Product Leadership

Product managers are creators of vision, strategy, design, products, services, and, ultimately, value. They must be equally comfortable with everything and everyone they work with, including engineering, sales, marketing, finance, and legal, and of course, customers and partners. A well-rounded product manager has a deep understanding of the product and the market. They must see the forest and the trees.

Product management has become a critical function for modern organizations, from small startups to corporate enterprises. And yet, the day-to-day work of product management remains largely misunderstood. In theory, product managers are high-flying visionaries who build products that people love. In practice, they're hard-working facilitators who bring clarity and focus to their teams. In this thoroughly revised and expanded edition, Matt LeMay provides real-world guidance for current and aspiring product managers.

Famously, over a four-year period, James Dyson made 5,127 prototypes of the cyclonic vacuum cleaner that would transform the way houses are cleaned around the world. In devoting all his resources to iteratively developing the technology, he risked it all, but out of many failures and setbacks came hard-fought success. In Invention: A Life, Dyson reveals how he came to set up his own company and led it to become one of the most inventive technology companies in the world. It is a compelling and dramatic tale, with many obstacles overcome.

In Project to Product, value stream network pioneer and technology business leader Dr. Mik Kersten introduces the Flow Framework - a new way of seeing, measuring, and managing software delivery. The Flow Framework will enable your company's evolution from project-oriented dinosaur to product-centric innovator that thrives in the age of software. If you're driving your organization's transformation at any level, this is the audiobook for you.  

The best products can still lose in the marketplace. Why? They are beaten by stronger product marketing. Yet, product marketing is widely misunderstood. It includes segmenting and targeting customers, positioning products vs. alternatives, creating product collateral, and supporting sales teams. But great product marketing achieves much more: it identifies the best way to bring your product to market, accelerates your product's ability to penetrate markets over time, shapes what the world thinks about your product and your category, and inspires customers to tell your product's story.

Frugal Value contests the notion that companies can rise to the great challenges of our time by adopting so-called "sustainable business" practices. Instead, the acute ecological crisis requires an all-round rethink of what business does and how it does it. This book explores what business responsibility looks like today and how it could be put into practice through far-reaching changes to companies, ranging from new approaches to product design and business models to reconfiguration of operations and innovative ownership structures.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you use design thinking to produce breakthrough innovations and transform your organization. This book will inspire you to: understand the transformative potential of design thinking; proceed from idea to product at lightning speed; iterate with rapid customer feedback; fail small and win big; create new products people love; lead design thinking teams more effectively; and open new paths to innovation at your company.

Providing managers, employees, CEOs, and board members a guide to build a sustainable, robust, female workforce at all levels, Better Together gives powerful and implementable solutions to fostering gender equality in your business. As a result, your business will be more successful, your customers will be happier with better products/services, and your employees will be much more fulfilled.

The nearly three billion people living on two dollars a day are not just the world’s greatest challenge - they represent an extraordinary market opportunity. The key is what Paul Polak and Mal Warwick call Zero-Based Design: starting from scratch to create innovative products and services tailored for the very poor, armed with a thorough understanding of what they really want and need, and driven by what Polak and Warwick call "the ruthless pursuit of affordability". Polak has been doing this work for years, and Warwick has extensive experience in both business and philanthropy.

Each year, thousands of new products are introduced to market. Most fail. What's worse is it doesn't have to be this way. The fact is product failure is rarely the result of either a lack of need or desire for a product; rather, products fail because the entrepreneur lacks the know-how to successfully develop, launch, and roll out his or her product.

It’s undeniable that we’re entering a new era of remote work. While many leaders seek to run business as usual, why settle for the usual when remote teams allow us to work even better? The research shows that employees are more productive and engaged when they have the freedom to work from anywhere.

Every dealer sells F&I products, and most dealers understand the importance of the F&I department in terms of its contribution to the bottom line. Unfortunately, F&I is not a regulated profession, meaning one doesn't need any type of state license to practice, and because of that there is very little formal education available. The actual management of the F&I department, product selection, and different types of participation programs are largely ignored, so most dealers, general managers, and finance managers must figure out these aspects in real time, on the job.

If you're looking for an effective and proven approach to product management - one that recognizes that the majority of product managers enter the field with little or no training and must learn through trial and error - this is the book for you. Take Charge Product Management guides you step-by-step along the product management path with tips, tactics, and tools to make you and your products more successful.

This book will help you become a better product leader. Benefitting from Roman Pichler’s extensive experience, you’ll learn how to align stakeholders and guide development teams even in challenging circumstances, avoid common leadership mistakes, and grow as a leader. Written in an engaging and easily accessible style, How to Lead in Product Management offers a wealth of practical tips and strategies. Through helpful examples, the book illustrates how you can directly apply the techniques to your work. 

The intention, desire, and hope in writing the Product Team Coach is to assist you in breaking down your barriers to understand what creating and running a product entails. What makes this audiobook unique is that it is purposefully crafted not to ascribe to any one style of Agile or iterative delivery of work, but instead focuses on the outcomes of team collaboration. Let this audiobook help you enter into a clearer understanding of how to turn ideas into living, breathing products.

Scrum is the most successful framework for agile product development, and much has been written about how to follow the Scrum process, but the key to success is in the leadership skills of the product owner. Product Mastery explores the traits of the best product owners, offering an insight into the difference between good and great product ownership and explaining how the best product owners are driven to be successful.

Agile doesn’t just change how teams work. It also changes how teams are led. Agile requires a radically different approach to leadership, one that puts business, design, and engineering at equal levels - where they must work as peers. This is called "lateral leadership", but it creates a challenge for roles like product management. Agile leadership requires teams to align around a committed vision and support it in the best possible way without formal authority.

Are you a product leader looking for advice on how to be certain that every product manager on your team lives up to their full potential? Do you want to make sure your product people are competent, empowered, and inspired, and would you like to know how you can best help them on this journey? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then this book is for you!

More and more traditional professional services firms are turning to "productization" as a strategy to grow, improve valuations, and to fend off new digital-first competitors. However, many of them will fail and waste a lot of money in the process. Productize first outlines the "Seven Deadly Productization Mistakes" made when pursuing a product strategy, then provides the blueprint for overcoming each of these missteps. It is designed to be a practical playbook for any leader of a professional services business who wants to successfully accelerate growth.

A humorous yet practical five-step guide to ridding ourselves - and our companies - of the bureaucratic bottlenecks and red tape that plague every office.