Updated: May 2021
I’m a voracious reader. When I approach any challenge with my teams or clients, I always look for a book or framework that helps frame the problem and guide me to the best solution.
Here is my essential list of books for every agile practitioner. I recommend reading the Top Picks from each section, regardless of your role. Please feel free to add your favorites in the comments!
For Executives/Managers:
- Product Development
- Organizational Development
- Top Pick: The Lean Startup
- Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You
- Scale: Seven Proven Principles to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back
- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap And Others Don’t
- Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
- The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
- Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers
- Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
- Leadership
- Top Pick: The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
- Top Pick: The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building
- Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
- Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results
- Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
- Getting to Wow! Silicon Valley Pitch Secrets for Entrepreneurs
- Principles: Life and Work
- Managing Oneself
- Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams pull Together and Others Don’t
- Recruiting
- Growing Pains
- Workflow and Process
- Top Pick: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
- Top Pick: Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done
- Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
- Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
- High-Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way
- Measure What Matters
- Making Work Visible
- Culture
For Product Owners:
- Product:
- Agile Product Management:
- Collaboration:
- Prioritization:
- Teamwork:
For Scrum Masters:
- Leadership
- Coaching
- Productivity
- Team Dynamics
- Agile Ceremonies
For Engineers:
- Agile Engineering Mindset
- Agile Process
- Agile Architecture
- DevOps
For UX Researchers/Designers:
- Top Pick: Build the Right Things: How to Design and Build a Product People Will Love
- Top Pick: Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams
- Observing the User Experience, Second Edition: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research
- Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for User Research
- Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights
- Validating Product Ideas
- It’s Our Research: Getting Stakeholder Buy-in for User Experience Research Projects
- Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics
- UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design
- Just Enough Research
- Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests
- Universal Methods of Design: 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions
For Designers:
- Top Pick: Don’t Make Me Think
- Top Pick: Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams
- Top Pick: The Design of Everyday Things
- Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
- UI is Communication
- Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
- About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design
- Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems
- 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People
- Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience
- Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design
For Agile Transformation Leaders:
- Top Pick: Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done
- Top Pick: Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
- Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, Revised 25th Anniversary Edition
- Influence Without Authority (2nd Edition)
- Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum
- Wired to Resist: The Brain Science of Why Change Fails and a New Model for Driving Success
- Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
- Reinventing Organizations
- The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything
- The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
Here are 3 Ways I can Help You Scale Your Business
- Get a free copy of my book, Build the Right Things, and learn how to discover and solve a BIG problem, save hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs, beat out your competition with a winning product strategy, and scale up quickly with data-driven product management.
- Apply to join my exclusive Product Leader Forum. In this group coaching forum, you will create strong relationships with other technology leaders, gather insight and guidance on your biggest challenges, create a clear and actionable plan to achieve your growth targets, and accountability partnership to make sure you’re successful.
- Setup a free coaching session with me to experience 1-on-1 Executive Coaching. I will help you create a vision for yourself and your business, break it down into achievable goals, and keep you accountable along the way.