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.

7 books on Operations & Scaling for idea & validation

  1. Designing Products People Love cover

    Scott Hurff

    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...

  2. Extreme Ownership cover

    Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

    Leaders own everything in their world, no excuses.

    Two former SEAL officers translate combat leadership into business principles, pairing battlefield stories with management applications. The core idea is extreme...

  3. High Output Management cover

    Andrew S. Grove

    A manager's output is the output of their whole organization.

    Andy Grove distills the management principles he used to run Intel into a practical operating manual for managers at any level. He frames management around leverage:...

  4. Lean UX cover

    Jeff Gothelf with Josh Seiden

    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...

  5. The Four Steps to the Epiphany cover

    Steve Blank

    Get out of the building and validate before you scale.

    Blank argues that startups fail not from product flaws but from a lack of customers, and proposes Customer Development as a parallel process to product development. He...

  6. The Leadership Challenge cover

    James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner

    Five evidence-based practices that exemplary leaders share.

    Based on research into what people did when at their personal best as leaders, Kouzes and Posner distill leadership into five practices: Model the Way, Inspire a...

  7. The Startup Owner's Manual cover

    Steve Blank and Bob Dorf

    The exhaustive playbook for finding customers before building the product.

    A dense, step-by-step manual that lays out the Customer Development process for taking a startup from idea to scalable business. It walks founders through customer...

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