There is an art to product development.
Lately we have seen a trend toward talking about leadership in terms of positive energy or the “law of attraction.” Said simply, the belief is that if you emanate a positive view and focus on good things then people will tend to follow and you will attract good things. While it is clear that people with a persistent positive focus make better leaders, it is not clear that they are better at building products. Being a good citizen and wanting good things is not always enough to make those good things happen; sometimes you must install some force or attractor that will compel the team to change. Many people have great visions. Less common are the hard skills to lead a product development effort toward that vision in meaningful bites.
Our reading list is for people actively involved in developing products. The books in this list will help people in the following roles: product owner, ScrumMaster, product champion, analyst, business analyst, the team, developer, architect, project manager, process mentor, graphic designer, and anyone who wants to better focus her energy on developing products.
The following resources will help those “in the trenches” with product development and the social aspects of building great product development teams. To help you understand why we chose each book, we have included a “One Big Like” (OBL) under each book.
- User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn
- OBL: Making small, sharp pieces of user-valued work to drive teams.
- Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman
- OBL: The science behind how our heads are wired to work together.
- Agile Retrospectives, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen
- OBL:Retrospectives help teams lean how to do the work better.
- The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey
- OBL: The principles here remain effective in moving from vision to realized goal.