Books

This one is personal. I didn't read it alone — I read it with my engineers at Payitoff. We'd discuss chapters together, debate what resonated, and call out what didn't match our reality. Those conversations were some of the best product discussions I've ever been part of.

Cagan's framework for discovery and delivery is essential, but what I took away most was this: the best product thinking happens in the open, with your team, not behind closed doors. This book gave us a shared language and the courage to challenge it.

I have to be honest about who Sheila Eckert is to me before I talk about this book. Sheila is the reason I became a Product Manager. She saw something in me before I saw it in myself, and her belief in the intersection of agile thinking and real human leadership is what pointed me toward this career. She didn't just influence my reading list — she shaped my entire trajectory.

This book is exactly who she is: practical, forward-thinking, and deeply human. As AI reshapes how we build and deliver, Sheila makes the case that agile isn't obsolete — it's the very framework we need to navigate what comes next. Required reading for any product person trying to stay ahead of the curve without losing sight of the people on the team.

Product management is, at its core, a communication job. You're constantly navigating competing priorities, misaligned stakeholders, and teams that need to feel safe enough to tell you the truth. This book is the operating manual for all of it.

What I took from it wasn't a script — it was a mindset shift. The most important conversations aren't the ones where you convince someone you're right. They're the ones where you actually hear what they're trying to say. Every PM should read this before their first difficult stakeholder meeting. Then read it again.

This isn't a product book. It's something more important. It's a book about why the work matters. Frankl's central argument — that meaning is something we choose, not something that happens to us — is a principle I carry into every room I walk into.

When I think about why I build products, why I care about the people using them, why I push for psychological safety on my teams — it all traces back to something I understood more deeply after reading this. Purpose isn't given. It's built. And that's as true for a product as it is for a life.

This was the first book I read when I made the leap from entertainment into product management. I didn't know the language yet, didn't know the frameworks, didn't know what a sprint retrospective was. This book handed me the vocabulary that built my career.

What I love about Rubin's approach is that he doesn't preach Scrum as dogma — he teaches the principles and trusts you to apply them with judgment. That distinction matters enormously. The framework is a tool, not a religion. I still believe that, and this is the book that first taught me to think that way.