Product Leadership

Shift your strategy downstream. Why do your customers buy from you rather than from your competitors? If you think the answer is your superior products, think again. Products are important, of course. For decades, businesses sought competitive advantage almost exclusively in activities related to new product creation. They won by building bigger factories, by finding cheaper raw materials or labor, or by coming up with more efficient ways to move and store inventory - and by inventing exciting new products that competitors could not replicate.

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.

Proactive Risk Management's unique approach provides a model of risk that is scalable to any size project or program and easily deployable into any product development or project management life cycle. It offers methods for identifying drivers (causes) of risks so you can manage root causes rather than the symptoms of risks. Providing you with an appropriate quantification of the key factors of a risk allows you to prioritize those risks without introducing errors that render the numbers meaningless.

This book is suitable for product managers, entreprenuers, and anyone who is interested in learning about the why, what and how of product management in a storytelling and step-by-step manner. The book is divided into multiple chapters and takes you to a journey for any product, from its ideation stage to launch using Agile Methodologies.

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.

The Influential Product Manager teaches product managers how to behave at each stage of the product life cycle to achieve the best outcome for the customer. Product managers are under pressure to drive spectacular results, often without wielding much direct power or authority. If you don’t know how to influence people at all levels of the organization, how will you create the best possible product?

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.

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.

Create a winning game plan for your digital products with Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age. Using a wide range of proven techniques and tools, author Roman Pichler explains how to create effective strategies and actionable roadmaps to help you maximize your chances of creating successful products. Written in an engaging and no-nonsense style, Strategize offers practical advice and valuable examples so that you can apply the practices directly to your products.

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. 

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.

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!

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.

The Lean Entrepreneur moves us beyond this myth. It combines powerful customer insight, rapid experimentation, and easily actionable data from the Lean Startup methodology to empower individuals, companies, and entire teams to evolve their vision, solve problems, and create value at the speed of the Internet. Anyone can be visionary.

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.

How did Ford Motors use Lean development to pull off one of the most impressive corporate turnarounds in history? Largely by avoiding the mistakes that so many companies make when in a death spiral. They looked beyond manufacturing efficiency to change the very fundamentals of how they developed vehicles. In Designing the Future, Lean product development expert James Morgan and world-renowned Lean guru Jeffrey K. Liker reveal why so many companies have achieved only moderate success with Lean in operations, with a limited impact on their overall business.

Agile project management has grown in popularity over the past several years. Change is occurring so fast that many organizations are unable to keep up with the demands of a changing global world. Your ability to quickly change and adapt to your environment will make or break, not only your career but could be the deciding factor as to whether your company survives in the coming years.

As companies evolve to adopt, integrate, and leverage software as the defining element of their success in the 21st century, a rash of processes and methodologies are vying for their product teams' attention. In the worst of cases, each discipline on these teams - product management, design, and software engineering - learn a different model.