Book review- Product Leadership

I had a chance to read “Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams” by Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, Nate Walkingshaw. What inspired me to read this book was interviews with more than 100 product managers and how they built awesome products. Unfortunately, this book didn’t live up to my expectation. More details down below but first some pros of the book.

This book is good compilation of what product management is all about. It even takes it a step further to explain product leadership and share how it’s different from product management. If one is starting out in product management, this can be a good beginning point.

Now on why I think this could have been better. First, there is nothing new in this book. If you have spent few years in product management and have read some books already (likes of Lean Startup, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Hard things about hard things) or read/watched online stuff (likes of Sam Altman series), the only thing that this book serves is to refresh some of those concepts.

Second, I felt that the writing style was too verbose, making it boring to read. Few ideas were repeated throughout the book. For example, part 2 of the book calls out how a PM is different across various organizational states, that is startup, emerging and enterprise, but there doesn’t seem to be much difference in the ways a PM would perform his job. Instead of this, exact difference in each of these would have been a better way of putting things together.

Third, the USP of this book was interviews with more than 100 Product Managers. These interview snippets spread across the book seem to be just touching the surface with no real-life examples of why they feel so and/or any practical actionable items for readers. This makes all concepts and ideas look weak and half-cooked.

Fourth, some of the concepts attributed to product leadership are true for general management. Example of these include, how to hire a team, buy vs build decisions, how to work with external partners etc.

Overall 2 out of 5 for me.