Every year, I overestimate how many books I’ll read. My goal this year was to read at least 1 book per month, and I read 8—I’m giving myself a generous 7/10 on this.

In 2025, I wanted to focus on improving my product management skills and strategic thinking, which heavily influenced my reading list.

Inspired

Demand Side Sales

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Understanding Michael Porter by Joan Magretta

I read this one after taking Shreyas Doshi’s Product Sense course, as he highly recommended it for understanding and improving strategic thinking. It’s an excellent book, full of powerful insights, and yet very accessible. It completely influenced how I think about product strategy, positioning, and differentiation. It’s an excellent book for Product Leaders and startup founders. It’s probably time for me to reread it.

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan

If you have worked at companies with a strong product culture, you’ve seen most of what is mentioned in the book, in some form or another. Both because Marty Cagan is very influential in the PM world and because his book is a collection of best practices that he noticed high-performing product teams were already using. If you haven’t, it’s a good way to be exposed to what is out there, but you’ll have to complement it with secondary literature if you want to put anything into practice.

The author intentionally avoids giving step-by-step recipes or frameworks and tries to stay at the core-principle level—probably so the book can stand the test of time. The book tries to cover so much that it leaves no space for examples or for how those principles are applied in practice.

My key takeaway from the book is the importance of validating ideas early in the product development process, when it’s cheaper to do so.

The chapter on managing stakeholders, although short, is probably my favorite. There are things in this chapter that I learned the hard way, and that still stings:

Not fully understanding the constraints that stakeholders operate in.
Assume you have buy-in and show a solution late in the development process. It’s not enough to show designs; it’s crucial to show prototypes and get explicit buy-in.

I recommend complementing the book with the two episodes Marty came on Lenny’s podcast:

Demand Side Sales 101 by Bob Moesta

This is one of those great books with a misleading title— I only read it because of another strong recommendation. And it’s indeed an excellent book for Product Leaders. It helps reshape your mindset around what to build, how to prioritize, and how to discover what customers really need to make progress in their lives. I think what stuck with me the most is how to conduct customer interviews properly.

I found this Lenny’s podcast episode to be a good companion to the book.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

The core concepts of this book could probably have been explained in a short blog post. But the book reads like a breeze. Why? Because the author explains the concepts through storytelling, and I learn better this way—I’m sure I’m not alone in this, and there are probably scientific papers about it. Highly recommended for anyone in a leadership position.

Awareness by Anthony De Mello

The book I was most skeptical about reading and the one that turned out to be my favorite. The book is a transcription of a series of live lectures and a conference by the author, a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist, and it touches on spirituality and religion. With this description and as a non-spiritual person, it didn’t seem like my cup of tea at all. But oh boy, it was a delightful read and turned out very influential in how I approach many aspects of life. It was the final push I needed to give guided meditation a try again—I’d tried before, but I could never make it a habit. Meditation is now part of my daily routine—I’m using an app called The Way.

It is also tangentially related to improving my product skills, perhaps in a non-obvious way—through metacognition and self-awareness. I wrote a few words about it here:

Understanding human motivation is at the core of Product Management, and starting with oneself is the first step

Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up by Jerry Colonna

Beautifully written—a mix of memoir and coaching session. The author, a poet at heart, builds rich imagery and analogies throughout the book and makes reference to them in a masterful way. It genuinely feels like a coaching session, if you’re willing to do the work.

I say “if you’re willing” because this book requires a certain openness. If your first reaction to concepts like emotional awareness is “this mumbo jumbo is not for me” or “feelings, duh,” you might bounce off it. But if you’re coachable, there’s a lot here.

The book is full of powerful questions—that’s kind of the point—but one that stuck with me is the author’s bastardization of a Zen aphorism:

This being so, so what? Things being as they are, what will you do about it?

I find myself coming back to it often.

I wrote about my first experience with Jerry Colonna here.

And this book pairs well with these podcast episodes:

7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy by Hamilton Wright Helmer

In my journey to improving my business strategy skills, I ended up buying this book. I quickly realized it wasn’t going to be a light beach read, but I persisted. It is a dense one, and I must admit I treated all the appendix sections with the mathematical formula derivations as a Terms & Conditions agreement (e.g., Derivation of Surplus Leader Margin for Scale Economies 😬).

The high-level concepts are not difficult to grasp, and the author illustrates them with compelling examples—some of which we’ve all heard of, like Netflix vs. Blockbuster, Kodak’s downfall, and SAP’s market dominance despite its poor product perception. It’s an excellent book for understanding how and why some companies have achieved persistent competitive advantage.

Shuna’s Journey by Hayao Miyazaki

The only fiction in book format I read this year is this graphic novel. I’m a big fan of Hayao Miyazaki’s work, and I enjoyed this one a lot. Mononoke Hime is among my favorite movies, and Nausicaa is one of my favorite manga. This book has many themes and elements that would later appear in both works.

Books I want to read in 2026

I usually don’t create a full reading list up front, but I know I want to read more fiction and fewer technical books. Those are the few I already have in mind, some of which are already in my pile: