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.
23 books on Product & Design for timeless
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Some things actually get stronger when life shocks them.
Taleb introduces antifragility, the property of systems that gain from volatility, stress, and disorder rather than merely surviving it. He contrasts the fragile, the...
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Design grounded in how people actually think and act.
This book distills psychology and behavioral research into 100 short, practical insights about how people see, read, remember, decide, and act. Each entry pairs a...
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Build a weekly habit of talking to customers to guide product decisions.
Continuous Discovery Habits presents a structured, sustainable approach to product discovery built on regular customer contact. Torres introduces the opportunity...
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The end-to-end manual for landing a product manager job.
Cracking the PM Interview demystifies the product manager role and the hiring process at major tech companies. It covers what PMs actually do, how to position a...
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Frameworks and model answers for tough PM interview questions.
Decode and Conquer is a focused playbook for answering product management interview questions. Lin introduces structured frameworks such as the CIRCLES Method for...
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The comprehensive field manual for human-centered product design.
This thorough reference walks through the full process of designing digital products and services, from research and personas through requirements, interaction design,...
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The best interface never makes the user stop and wonder how it works.
Steve Krug argues that the first law of usability is that a page should be self-evident, so users never have to think about how to use it. Through short chapters and...
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Real motivation comes from autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Drawing on decades of behavioral science, Pink argues that the carrot-and-stick incentives most organizations rely on are mismatched to how people actually work. He...
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Stop shipping features for their own sake and create real value.
Escaping the Build Trap explains how companies get stuck measuring success by features shipped instead of value created, and how to break out. Perri lays out the role...
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The four-step Hook Model behind products people use without thinking.
Hooked lays out the Hook Model, a four-phase cycle of trigger, action, variable reward, and investment that explains how successful products build user habits. Drawing...
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Learn to ask the questions that surface what users really do.
A practical guide to planning and conducting user interviews that yield genuine insight rather than confirmation of what you already believe. Portigal covers...
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Do the research you need, and skip the rest.
Hall delivers a concise, no-nonsense guide to doing effective research without the overhead that intimidates small teams. She covers how to ask good questions, avoid...
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High talent density plus radical candor minus controls.
Hastings and Meyer reveal the unusual management philosophy behind Netflix, built on three moves: raise talent density, increase candor, then progressively remove...
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A hands-on toolkit for actually doing user research.
This practitioner's guide walks through the practical methods of user research, from interviews and surveys to usability testing and field studies. It explains when to...
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Treat people like adults and build a high-performance culture.
Drawing on her years shaping Netflix's culture, Patty McCord rejects conventional HR practices in favor of treating employees as capable adults. She argues for radical...
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Product management is mostly people, not frameworks.
Matt LeMay focuses on the everyday, tactical realities of product management rather than abstract theory. He argues the job is a connective role defined by...
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Roadmaps are about outcomes and direction, not feature lists.
This book reframes the product roadmap as a strategic communication tool centered on themes and outcomes rather than dated feature commitments. The authors walk...
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Why the quiet half of the team is often the most powerful.
Cain blends psychology, neuroscience, and case studies to argue that modern Western culture overvalues extroversion and systematically undervalues introverts. She...
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Use psychology to make products people actually enjoy using.
Anderson reframes interaction design around the stages of seduction, applying principles from psychology to make experiences engaging rather than merely functional....
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A clear model of what user experience actually is.
The Elements of User Experience lays out a five-plane model, from abstract strategy to concrete surface, that explains how the pieces of a user experience fit...
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Stop letting programmers design the products users hate.
Cooper argues that high tech products frustrate people because they are designed by engineers optimizing for what is easy to build rather than what users actually...
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A cross-disciplinary reference of how good design works.
Universal Principles of Design is an illustrated reference covering concepts drawn from across design, psychology, and engineering, with each principle explained on a...
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Map the user's journey to build the product that matters.
User Story Mapping introduces a visual technique for organizing user stories into the flow of a user's experience so teams build a coherent product rather than a pile...
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