The Founder Bookshelf
Books founders recommend to each other. Browse by topic or by where you are as you grow, mark what you've read, and add what's next.
11 books on Product & Design for finding pmf
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A step-by-step process for reaching product-market fit.
The Lean Product Playbook offers a concrete, six-step process for achieving product-market fit using minimum viable products and rapid customer feedback. Olsen...
1 founder recommends Get the book ↗
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Design and reinvent your business model on a single canvas.
A visually rich, co-created handbook that introduces the Business Model Canvas, a one-page framework of nine building blocks for describing how an organization...
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Customers do not buy products, they hire them to do a job.
Christensen and co-authors lay out the Jobs to Be Done theory: people hire products and services to make progress in specific circumstances of their lives. By...
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How great designers turn ideas into products people actually love.
Hurff distills how successful product designers think and work, drawing on interviews with practitioners across the industry. He covers everything from finding what to...
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Short, sharp essays on building the right product.
This compact book collects essays from Intercom's team on how to do product management well. It covers deciding what to build, ruthlessly prioritizing, saying no, and...
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Design as a fast, collaborative, hypothesis-driven team activity.
Lean UX applies the principles of Lean Startup and agile to the practice of user experience design. It reframes design as a collaborative, hypothesis-driven process...
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How economics learned that humans are not perfectly rational.
Thaler tells the story of how behavioral economics grew from a fringe idea into a mainstream discipline. He recounts his own career and the resistance he faced arguing...
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Run your own usability tests, cheaply and often.
Rocket Surgery Made Easy is a practical, step-by-step guide to doing your own usability testing without a lab or specialists. Krug shows how a few users a month can...
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Build organizations that learn from customers and adapt continuously.
Sense and Respond argues that software is reshaping every industry and that successful organizations are those that sense customer behavior and respond quickly with...
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A field manual for surviving and thriving in your product role.
Steven Haines offers a practical, no-nonsense guide to the realities of the product manager job, from understanding the role to working across functions. It covers...
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Build what customers actually want using the value proposition canvas.
A companion to Business Model Generation that zooms into the value proposition and customer segment blocks of the canvas. It introduces the Value Proposition Canvas,...
Questions, answered
What books do founders recommend?
Founders on the eChai network recommend titles like The Lean Product Playbook, Business Model Generation, and Competing Against Luck. The bookshelf ranks books by how many founders have read them.
Where can I find a startup reading list?
The eChai founder bookshelf is a curated, founder-recommended reading list you can browse by topic (fundraising, product, hiring) and by stage.
How is the bookshelf ordered?
By recommendation: the more founders mark a book read, the higher it ranks. You can also sort by newest or A to Z.
