New Product Owner Recommended Reading

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

“The future is already here —it's just not very evenly distributed” according to William Gibson. We already live in a world of AI, IOT, drones, robots, VR/AR etc but maybe you haven’t noticed or incorporated those ideas into your product? Diamandis talks about how these technologies are accelerating and converging at the same time.

Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

The Design Thinking Playbook: Mindful Digital Transformation of Teams, Products, Services, Businesses, and Ecosystems

People don’t have time for lousy products. As a PO you’ll need to work closely with designers and incorporate the design process into your workflow. 

Michael Lewrick

The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses
MVP is probably the most overused term in the industry. This book will not only help you understand what it means but also how to test your product idea and pivot at the right time.

Eric Ries

Learn to Program

Being able to code is becoming a life skill. With just a little knowledge you’ll see new ways of problem solving and opportunities for automation. It’ll also give you some empathy for your team.

Chris Pine

Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want

Business canvases and value propositions are key tools in your product toolkit for connecting your products to your customers. This book takes you through the key steps.

Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age
Roadmaps are a great way to get all tangled up as a product owner and can often be interpreted as a replacement for a project Gannt chart. This book offers a useful alternatives way of presenting your roadmap.

Roman Pichler

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

This book will help you understand how product organisations should work and the other roles in product you may need to collaborate with. 

Alexander Osterwalder

The Professional Product Owner: Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage

This book looks at product ownership from the scrum perspective, but also has some great practical tools including dashboards and creating and managing your product backlog. Remember the quality of your product backlog is directly proportional to the quality of your backlog.

Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham

The Evidence-Based Management Guide

As you start to put the owner into product owner you’ll be starting to look to initiate decision making rather than receiving decisions. Using the model laid out in this guide will bring valuable insights into your product and what to do about it.

Scrum.org

Agile Estimating and Planning

Not only is this to go-to book for your dev team to understand how to estimate size, but it’s also a great reference for POs to understand how to estimate value. Jump straight to part 3 Planning value to dive into ROI, NPV, IRR, etc.
Mike Cohn

The Scrum Guide
A big mistake is to think only the scrum master cares about the scrum framework. As part of the scrum team, the PO needs to understand their accountabilities and the basis of empirical thinking.

Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland