Product and technology books to read 2021
For the last few years, I’ve been challenging myself to improve my reading habit, the only rule that I follow is to read my little books every single day, it has been working and I’m really enjoying spending my free time watching movies, walking my dogs and also reading.
I’ve been through some books this year, some of them are about Product & Technology and they helped me a lot in terms of understanding new areas, how some important people mindset works, technologies, strategies, and businesses.
I would like to recommend those books and share my opinions and my perceptions of each of them.
Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
The first book of this series is maybe the most controversial one, the book Blitzcalling by Chris Yeh and Reid Hoffman is all about prioritizing speed over efficiency, of course, this mindset applies to startups companies that need to grow fast but it also applies to a new product or new vertical area in a well-established company.
The authors talk about several examples in AirBnB, Amazon, Facebook, Zara, and other innovative companies that sometimes led to manual work or inefficient processes in order to increase the market share and establish themselves as the first company to offer their product and services. It is about taking risks to grow or simply die.
It is controversial because many times the authors say about hiring people that are not prepared yet, launching products that still suck, scale the product until the operation didn’t support it anymore only then to start to organize operations to tackle it. It is to do everything in the name of speed.
Besides the controversial side, it has a lot of relevant facts about the world economy, business, culture, and companies gain & loss money. It is worth reading.
By the way, we can say this book is the opposite of the third on this list: Think Like Amazon.
The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
This book by Camille Fournier, as the name suggests, is a guide to help technical leaders, engineers, or engineer managers to understand how the coder’s career ladder works and what is expected from them as managed or manager.
The book is divided into two parts: how to be managed and how to manage.
It was exciting because at the first time I saw the book I was down to learn about “how to manage” but in the first few chapters about “how to be managed” I came to notice that it is valuable and it might help engineers that sometimes doesn’t take along with their boss or even them who don’t understand what their boss stands for.
It has a lot of tips to establish and improve the 101 meetings and the process of mentoring inexperienced developers. I liked the tip about trying to keep an alive “agenda” so we can add or remove topics that we want to discuss in further 101 meetings. And the idea for managers who manage other managers to “skip level” and talk directly to engineers, it sounds very good to be heard by a top-level manager periodically.
There is a chapter only about the challenges to be a tech lead, how to have time to take part in meetings, and plus have time to code and participate in business decisions.
I recommend this book to every engineer who wants to improve their soft skills, and especially who is willing to be (or understand) a manager, manager’s manager, director, vice president of engineering, and chief technology officer.
Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader
This book by John Rossman talks about 50 and a half ideas to be Digital Leader, he is an ex-Amazon Executive telling about what a company should do to be digital and how it should be done.
The book is divided into Culture, Strategy, Business & Technology and Approach and Execution, I will separate some ideas that I usually try to apply.
Get back to day one: Jeff Bezos says it a lot, there is two types of company, those that are still in day one and the companies that are going to die. Day one means that we are constantly innovating. If your business has become stagnant, admit the situation, and do something.
Don’t go along to get along: It is directly related to Amazon Principle 13 “Disagree and Commit”. I love that one because we all have seen so many people doing politics in a corporate environment and we all know how it can destruct a company and its culture.
Ownership for everyone: The best part here is that we are responsible for things that are out of our control. We used to say that “our partner is terrible” or something like that, but in the end, it is our responsibility to deal with that problem.
These and other ideas worth reading this book even if you are not a big decision-maker at your company.
INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group)
First of all, I must be honest that sometimes I hated this book, especially when the author says we can do several discovery processes within a single week (I am struggling to do much fewer tasks haha) and other parts when the author says a lot of discovery techniques without too many details and often so similar to other technique, for me it is a little confusing.
I’d rather organize things inside “well-defined boxes” therefore it is hard to talk about “creativity” and qualitative measurement. It is stuff like this that is why I do recommend developers and engineers to read and reflect on this book. It is very important to understand the product manager role and activities because we also need to understand the value we are delivering, validate feasibility, business viability, and usability.
It is also very important to understand the differences in discovering and execution processes, learn some discover techniques, the why and when to apply each of them, and understand how product team and engineers team are organized in successful companies.
Just to let you curious I will share two main points I keep with me from this book.
The first one is about finding an alternative to the current way that we do product road maps. The author says that the executive manager wants to make sure of two things while doing traditional roadmaps:
- If we are working on top priorities
- If the business will support the features we are working on
What new strategy can we have to replace the current product roadmap? The proposal is to use Objective and Key Results (OKR) and high-integrity commitment. Of course, it is not that easy but the book do a lot of recommendations based on the style of the company you are working on.
The second is about the Opportunity Assessment Technique that helps share the key points about something that a team is planning to work on. The idea is to have the following answer and share it across the whole team:
- What business objective is this work intended to address?
- How will you know if you have succeeded?
- What problem will this solve for our customers?
- What type of customer?
I think those are very good questions before starting any task. I do recommend reading this book especially if you only read books about code.
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
This book was written by Reed Hasting the Netflix CEO is about a completely new way to build Culture in a tech company. The worst thing about reading this book is that probably you will notice that you have been behaving in the opposite direction.
Most of us, in our company, when something fails we have the tendency to review the failure to create a process in order to minimize the risk to other employees do the same therefore each failure we do is limited by control. Of course, it creates a limited environment where innovation will probably not raise.
How to balance efficiency and innovation? Netflix tries to answer that question prioritizing the innovation, regardless of being necessary to have a large profit and a business where the mistake is acceptable (where the damage is not like killing people) there are innovative ideas to create a better innovation based on no rules.
Some of the ideas are:
- Talent density: If you will not fight for an employee to stay in your team, you probably are decreasing the talent density. Keep only the best. It sounds cruel, I think it probably is.
- You need to say what you really think, if necessary in front of all others. Sometimes it is the right time to be candid. Always with good intent. Don’t be the Brilliant Jerk.
- Remove policies like vacations, travel, and expense approvals. You don’t control the hours of the day why control days of the year?
- Pay top the market. The interesting here is the incentive for people to know how much the market is paying for their jobs and share with the company so Netflix will adjust the compensation. It really needs a beautiful profit.
- Share everything with everyone on Netflix, people make better decisions with all the information available, including P&L statement.
- Lead with Context, Not Control
Of course, it is not like a dream, and the culture is based mainly on Freedom and Responsibility (F&R), it also shares some bad aspects of having this culture, the employee is gonna try to rip you off sometimes, and you need to deal with that person and avoid applying new control process for others. I have no idea how hard it should be, however treating people like an adult sounds logical and honest.
I really recommend this book and I am still fascinated.
I hope you like and share the books you’ve been reading that you loved.
