Top 9 Books that made me a better product manager in 2025

If you can only read two books from this list, make it these:

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss
How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices by Annie Duke by Annie Duke

Negotiation best-practices from an FBI hostage negotiator & decision-making best-practices from a champion poker player. Is there a joke I could make here about the immediate relevance to modern product management? Maybe?

Focus on Product Management fundamentals

Hypothesis-Driven Development: A Guide to Smarter Product Management by Alex Cowan
Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers by Michele Hansen
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

I started a new product management role in 2025 and read all 3 of these while onboarding.

More History of Microcomputers

The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer by Michael Moritz
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender
Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda
High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems by Karen Southwick

You will be hard-pressed to find a better books about the earliest days of Apple Computer and Steve Jobs career than “the Little Kingdom” and “Becoming Steve Jobs”. I expect future historians will default to using these as foundational texts. “Creative Selection” digs into the design process behind the iPhone UX “High Noon” is fascinating since it was published near the zenith of Sun Microsystems power and influence in the industry and can now be read with 20/20 hindsight. By my count, the word “Linux” was only mentioned on time in the text.