My Top 3 books for 2019

Management

I do a lot of management for a living and so I read a lot of management books. Since reading gives you only bookish knowledge, I re-read a lot for cross-referencing and reflecting on real life situations. It helps me bridge the dissonance between the kind of manager I intend to be and the kind I end up being. One of the books that has stuck this year through the re-reads and stayed awhile with me is Radical Candor. (There's a lot of material out there about this book, including this talk)

While you may not be able to lift and land the radical candor Kim Scott talks about, into your company culture, the tagline of "Care Personally, Challenge Directly" and the famous framework she references, is a great tool to align your thoughts and influence the way you manage. This is what makes the book work.

Personally though I really enjoyed this table that distinguishes between a Micromanager (the #1 sin and every manager's worst nightmare) and absentee management while calling out the characteristics of that mythical perfect manager - the partner.

Technology

Technology being the fastest changing field there is, it's hard to escape reading about tech. For the most part though one ends up either reading or listening to podcasts about the "latest" trends in a breathless attempt to keep up and not become outdated. If you are hands on then you end up reading what you need to know to implement.

I quite like the idea of reading academic papers - as a matter of fact we have an amazing slack channel at work dedicated to papers (called #knowledge-train) but they can be intimidating and oftentimes challenging to relate to.

That's why books like Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann are so brilliant. It's a broad based book ranging from the fundamentals of data models moving on to the challenges of working with distributed data and ending with techniques for derived data via batch and stream processing. No matter where your company is in the data journey, or how incomplete your understanding is, this book will catch you up. It helps you understand the theory while offering you a clear under the hood practical understanding of how current distributed systems work.

At 600 pages it's not a book you can skim through, and it's super easy to get lost in the rabbit hole of papers and books referenced at the end of each chapter. It is a very rewarding technical book though and is actually easy to read. It's an oReilly book and I have a free oReilly account paid for by my work, plus there are free pdf's floating around the internet, but I still went ahead and bought the book as this one is a classic.

Product

The growth of the Product Manager role is probably the most astronomical one in the last decade and reading about product management used to frustrate me. I have mostly worked at enterprise companies all my life and typically product development looks almost nothing like how those books describe them. Plus it's harder to visualize concepts like product market fit when you're building a small piece of the whole. This is even more true in India where the origins of the software industry has been as a backoffice.

In the last couple of years though, I've been fortunate to witness a change - there is a strong sense of ownership expected now from technology teams. Engineering teams are brought in much earlier in the product process - yes we have some way to go but now I do see light at the end of the tunnel.

Marty Cagan's Inspired while aimed at Product Owners should be read by anyone building Products. There are inspiring profile stories of famous product owners interspersed with product management processes such as ideation and discovery. If a whole book on Product Management doesn't sound appealing I'd recommend reading the svpg blog specifically this one Missionaries, vs Mercenaries, you will look differently at how you want to build an engineering team after that.

Happy Reading!