SP
Startups, product and software teams
Methods for building startups, small businesses and software products, from customer discovery to scaling.
58 books on Startups, product and software teams, recommended by 111 people including Mohnish Pabrai and Nat Eliason.
58 books · 116 experts
Start here
- The Phoenix ProjectGene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford, 2013
- Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!Greg Crabtree, Beverly Herzog, 2011
- BuildTony Fadell
- Continuous Discovery HabitsTeresa Torres
- Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary ProductsMarty Cagan, Chris Jones
The best books on Startups, product and software teams 58
Greg Crabtree, Beverly Herzog · 2011
Owner-operator economics: labour efficiency and the four keys.
Recommended byNat Eliason
T3 Build
Tony Fadell
Fadell built the iPod, the iPhone, and Nest. Build is structured as a book of advice organized by career stage and product phase. It is unusually honest about failure, about the texture of executive dysfunction, and about what it actually takes to ship physical products at Apple-level quality. The section on storytelling for products is particularly strong.
unverified
Teresa Torres · 2021
Torres operationalizes what Cagan describes. Weekly customer touchpoints, opportunity-solution trees, assumption testing — this is the most practical account of how discovery actually becomes a habit rather than a quarterly exercise. Pairs directly with Inspired as the how to its what.
Marty Cagan, Chris Jones
Cagan's follow-on to Inspired shifts from product craft to organizational conditions. The argument: you cannot have great products without empowered product teams, and empowered teams require managers who coach toward outcomes rather than manage toward outputs. Addresses the question Inspired leaves open — what do you change first?
unverified
Melissa Perri
Perri names the organizational failure mode precisely: companies that measure success by shipping features rather than producing outcomes. The book is a diagnosis of product management dysfunction at the company level and a structural argument for why PM must own outcomes, not output, to function at all.
unverified
Nir Eyal · 2014
Eyal's model of trigger, action, variable reward, and investment describes how products build habits at a mechanistic level. Useful for product designers and equally useful for anyone trying to understand when habit formation serves users and when it serves only the product.
Marty Cagan · 2008
The foundational text of the modern PM role. Cagan's central argument — that most companies build the wrong things because they treat product as a delivery function rather than a discovery function — reframes everything that follows. The chapter on product discovery versus product delivery is worth the price of the book.
Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz · 2013
The most systematic treatment of metrics for product teams. Croll and Yoskovitz organize analytics by business model type and stage, helping teams identify the one metric that matters most at each phase. Prevents the common failure of tracking everything and learning from nothing.
T3 Shape Up
Ryan Singer · 2019
Singer's alternative to continuous sprints: fixed time, variable scope, with shaping work done in advance to reduce ambiguity before building begins. Whether or not the specific Basecamp process translates, the argument against infinite backlogs and the emphasis on appetite over estimation are worth wrestling with.
T3 Sprint
Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz · 2001
The five-day sprint compresses months of product debate into a week by forcing teams to prototype and test with real users before committing to a build. Knapp's method is deliberately theatrical — that's a feature, not a bug. The value is in the forcing function.
Ben Horowitz · 2014
Horowitz writes for leaders who are past the theory stage and into the problems that have no clean solution — when to fire a friend, how to lead through a near-death experience, why most leadership advice is written for easy conditions. The antidote to frameworks that assume stability.
“…books I've recommended, highlighted to death, or forced on friends.”Andrew Wilkinson
Dan Olsen · 2015
Olsen's product-market fit pyramid — target customer, underserved needs, value proposition, feature set, UX — is the clearest structural framework for thinking about fit. Where Ries describes validated learning as a philosophy, Olsen gives it a repeatable shape. Particularly strong on how to prioritize which hypotheses to test first.
Recommended byNir Eyal
Eric Ries · 2011
Ries brought validated learning to a mainstream business audience. The build-measure-learn loop and the distinction between vanity metrics and actionable metrics remain the clearest vocabulary for thinking about uncertainty in product development. Slightly dated in its startup-centric framing but foundational.
“Feld has recommended Ries's systematization of customer feedback loops as one of the most influential frameworks to emerge from Silicon Valley in the 2010s. He values it particularly for founding teams who are building before they have validated what customers actually want.”Brad Feld
T3 The Mom Test
Rob Fitzpatrick · 2014
Short, sharp, and corrective. Fitzpatrick diagnoses why customer interviews so often produce false positives: people are polite and will validate almost any idea you present with sufficient enthusiasm. The fix is asking about past behavior, not hypothetical futures. A genuinely useful retraining of interview instincts.
Frederick P. Brooks · 1974
Why adding people to a late software project makes it later.
“Says it "had a huge impact on me" — a foundational software-management text for the engineer-CEO.”Marc Benioff
Sarah P. Noble · 1991
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Michael E. Gerber · 1995
Build the business as a replicable prototype; the franchise mindset generalised.
“Rated 10/10; Sivers repeatedly cites it as the book that shaped how he systematized CD Baby so the business could run without him.”Derek Sivers
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Barry Moltz · 2003
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Guy Kawasaki · 2004
Bo Burlingham · 2005
Firms that deliberately chose to be great rather than big.
“Buy it, read it, keep it under your pillow and absorb it via osmosis.”Marc Andreessen
Recommended byEv Williams
Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur · 2010
The canvas: the common vocabulary for describing any business model.
Recommended byNir Eyal
Recommended byAndy Budd
Noam Wasserman · 2012
The data on founder control, dilution and succession.
Linda Rottenberg · 2014
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Jim Collins · 2017
Open Library unreachable this run; title not machine-verified.
Recommended byReed Hastings
Recommended byRan Segall
“Hoffman's own framework for scaling companies faster than is conventionally prudent — accepting chaos in exchange for market capture. Referenced constantly in Masters of Scale episodes as the conceptual backbone for every case study he discusses.”Reid Hoffman
Elad Gil · 2018
Operating manual for scaling a company from fifty to thousands
William C. Lazier · 2020
Expanded edition of the 1992 book; not machine-verified.
Recommended byJulie Stevanja
Alan Weiss · 1992
Value pricing for solo and boutique consultancies.
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Recommended byNat Eliason
Recommended byDavid Hellmann
Peter Thiel · 2014
Open Library records first_publish_year as 2001; actual publication 2014
“Thiel's argument for contrarian thinking and monopoly-seeking maps onto Bezos's stated belief that competition is for losers — that the goal is to build something so customer-obsessed and hard to replicate that comparison-shopping becomes irrelevant.”Jeff Bezos
Experts 116
The people who wrote this page's books, and the people who recommend them.
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