Today with this article, I will be talking about some of the best examples of SaaS books that are must-reads for anyone interested in the matter.
I hope you’ll enjoy them. š¤©
Product – 4 Best Books for mastering the art of product
1- Product-Led Onboarding: How to Turn New Users Into Lifelong Customers
Quick info
This book provides the basic 6-step strategy used by the big names such as Mixpanel, Outsystems, and Ubisoft; it uncovers the ideology and methodology behind these companies’ success and teaches you how to follow their lead gain more loyal clients for the long term.
Author biography
The authors of this highly informative must-have book are Ramli John and Wes Bush.
Ramli John is the Content Director of Appcues and the PLG Coach of ProductLed. For ProductLed, he works with innovative companies to maximize their revenue growth with the help of PLG strategies. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and two dogs.
Wes Bush is the CEO and founder of ProductLed. He’s one of the most popular product experts in the game. He’s known to be great at working with large teams all around the globe and teaching them how to transform their product into brilliant tool that leads to growth.
Why should you have it?
This book consists of practical, detailed, and actionable advice and step-by-step instructions that will teach you how to onboard new users based on the author’s years of personal experience on the matter. If you’re a founder, project manager, or marketer, this book is a must-read for you.
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2- Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction While Embracing Uncertainty
Quick info
This book by Bruce McCarthy acts as a practical guide that helps you understand how to create an impactful product roadmap and use that roadmap to go parallel with stakeholders and meet the needs and wants of the market relevantly – all starting from the bottom.
With this book, you will learn the basics of communication and what it means in the frame of your products, making it an invaluable piece of work that ultimately brings massive success to your potential customers and your organization.
Author biography
Bruce McCarthy founded Product Culture in 2018 to assist product teams on their journey to success while managing organization design, skills development, and leadership. He’s a well-known writer, a sought-after speaker, and is highly skilled in product management, development, and innovation.
He’s extremely passionate about helping teams work together to develop more efficient products and valuable services. Right now, he is the CEO of UpUp Labs and President of the Boston Product Management Association.
Why should you have it?
This book is a must-have since it speaks directly to the product managers, business owners, business analysts, program managers, designers, business leaders, development managers, entrepreneurs, revenue leaders, etc. It’s highly informative and instructive; if you choose to read it, you’ll learn how to get your sales team up and running, working willingly with your presence, come up with relevant and accurate goals for your products, take on a user-centric approach to your planning and decision-making processes.
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3- Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want
Quick info
This book uncovers all the sensitive topics that every B2B SaaS founder and CEO should master. The lessons and advice provided to the reader are all about B2B product validation and product-market fit achievement. It’s also full of eye-opening chapters that give detailed information on the matter they’re looking into.
Author biography
Etienne Garbugli primarily helps entrepreneurs and innovators examine customer insights and learn from them in order to develop their products and grow their business models. He’s a three-time Startup Founder, a five-time entrepreneur, and an expert in customer research. He especially specializes in B2B.
He published the Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want, in 2014.
With this book, he has achieved to help thousands of entrepreneurs and innovators all across the globe.
Why should you have it?
With this book, you will have the knowledge you need to embrace the fresh market opportunities and find the right one specifically created for your team, and identify common challenges and frictions along the way – to overcome them, you’ll be provided with particular ninja techniques to speed up your problem-solving process. You’ll also be able to find the early adopters, and act quickly on them after you have fully read and understood the context. There’s just so much to learn from it!
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4- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Quick info
The book Hooked is based on the author’s years of experience, research, consulting and detailed studies. The driving force that made the author come up with the book in the first place is the idea, the need to have a handbook as a start-up founder – the how-to guide that every beginner yearns for in the beginning. The book is primarily written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anybody who wishes to gain a better understanding of how products impact people’s behaviors.
Author biography
Nir Eyal is the bestselling author of “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products”. He has previously taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Hasso Pattner Institute of Design. He loves to write about technology, psychology, and business. His writings are displayed in the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, TechCrunch, and Psychology Today.
Why should you have it?
The book provides the readers with rich, practical, and actionable takeaways and insights that help create business habits that lead to outstanding customer success and customer experience. While reading, you’ll also encounter exclusive examples from the giants like Apple, Twitter, Pinterest, Bible App, etc. You will see how these names transformed the notion of ”product” into something extraordinarily impactful.
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Marketing – Best 3 books for understanding marketing
5- High Growth Handbook
Quick info
Behind this book, there’s an author that has worked with many giants over the years. During all that experience, it’s natural that a particular set of common patterns, observations, and habits have emerged. So, Elad Gil decided to turn that invaluable pile of information into a practical handbook that covers all the key topics including the CEO’s role, recruiting, managing, budgets, fundings, and so on. This book is here to introduce you to crystal clear guidance that deals with navigating even the most complicated problems that sales leaders have to face every day.
Author biography
Elad Gil is an entrepreneur, investor, and an advisor to notable companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase, Gusto, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, etc. In addition, he’s co-founder and a chairman at Color Genomics. He previously spent many years working for Google, where he laid the foundations of the mobile team and was involved in everything that had to do with keeping that team on track.
Why should you have it?
This is a book about building a start-up organization from the bottom. If you’re one of those people who are about to start their first software business and looking for a practical handbook that keeps you highly informed, this is the book for you. It’s very straightforward and easy to understand & digest. It consists of highly technical advice, interesting interviews, hints, tactics, and so on. It doesn’t have a monotonous narrative so that everything feels interesting and engaging even until the end.
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6- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Quick info
Influence is probably the first book that comes to mind when someone brings up ”persuasion”. This is most probably because the book does a great job explaining the psychology behind the reasons why people keep saying ”yes” to things. With the context, you’ll learn the six universally-accepted principles, how to benefit from them yourself to become a persuader, and how to protect yourself from those that are persuaders as well.
Author biography
Dr. Robert Cialdini is one of the top experts dealing with the fields of impact and persuasion. He has thirty-five years of researching past, as well as a three-year study program focusing on what causes people to change behavior, which he also explains in detail within the book.
He’s wildly regarded as the ”Godfather of influence” with respect to his many years of scientific research and studies.
Why should you have it?
The certain techniques and methods provided within this book are incredibly fundamental to human psychology, and the way the author chose to explain this matter in perfect convenience is definitely commendable. With a story-like narrative, the book gives you the opportunity to benefit from the repeatedly emphasized phrases, notions, and tactics to gain a more throughout understanding. It also focuses significantly on teaching the reader how to protect themselves from psychological manipulation.
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7- Scientific Advertising
Quick info
Scientific Advertising is one of the most important works dealing with advertising from the early 20th century. It is STILL used today by those who wish to start by learning the basics and then progressively continue with the more advanced part of the advertising world. This classic book consists of an essential reading into the aspects of advertising, including the advertising laws, how they are established, headlines, the psychology behind the advertisement, strategies, budgeting, and so on.
Author biography
Claude C. Hopkins was very well known as the father of modern advertising methods, and he believed that advertising existed solely because of the purpose of selling something and thus should be taken into account and justified by the results it created.
During his lifetime, he worked for numerous advertisers, including Bissell Carpet Sweeper Company, Swift & Company, and Dr. Shoop’s patent medical company.
He, very firmly, believed that an ideal product and the atmosphere around it was usually its own best sales team, and, as thus, he was a great believer in sampling. Today, his genius work continues to teach the upcoming students about advertising.
Why should you have it?
This book was published in the early 1900’s, however, the strategies and the principles are still as fresh today as they were back then. This might be because the human nature, and the psychology behind our actions, haven’t changed at all. Yes, we may have more advanced techniques with our distribution channels, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the primary way of thinking has changed. This is why this book is a must-read for you if you’re in business, marketing, selling, or just somebody willing to learn from a great piece of masterwork.
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Metrics – Best 2 Books for Measuring Key Metrics
8- How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business
Quick info
As an engineer, this book makes me happy. An excellent discussion of how to break *any* problem down into quantifiable metrics, how to figure out which of those metrics is valuable, and how to measure them. The book is fairly actionable, there is a complementary website with lots of handy excel tools, and there are plenty of examples to help you along. The only downside is that this is largely a stats book in disguise, so some parts are fairly dry and a the difficulty level jumps around a little bit. If you make important decisions, especially in business, this book is for you.
Author biography
Douglas Hubbard is a highly-skilled speaker, management consultant, and an author in decision sciences and actuarial science. He’s the inventor of the AIE method (Applied Information Economics) and founder of Hubbard Decision Research. His books are highly instructive and informative since he aims to educate those interested in risk management, measurement, business threats and opportunities, cybersecurity, etc.
Why should you have it?
This is book is great for those looking for an informative guide that’s both easy-to-read and explainatory of the way managers deal with risky situations and how they make more productive business decisions. With the help of this book, you’ll get to try the impactful tactics provided and suggested to you and see if they work for you and your business. You can never know unless you try!
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9- Winning with Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future
Quick info
Winning with Data is the primary guide to help you achieve revolution within the culture of your team company, making use of data to gain a more competitive and throughout approach on your business decisions. Analyzing data to come up with productive advantages has always been an issue for teams until now. This practical guide, however, aims to change that. By showing the ideal sales method, tools, and techniques already being used by some giant companies, the book understandably explains these methods.
Author biography
Tomasz Tunguz is a managing director at Redpoint; he’s also a highly active blogger at tomtunguz.com and is the co-author of the book on my list: Winning with Data, which does a magnificent job uncovering the cultural and business-related changes that come with big data.
Frank Bien is the CEO of Looker, a business intelligence platform. He has been focusing significantly on assisting teams in adapting to the changing company culture and working more efficiently.
Why should you have it?
This book is one of the best examples that show the readers how they achieve their goals with the help of alterations in team and company culture. It also contains numerous concepts linked to data management and offers solutions to the common problems related to this field.
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Management – Best 3 Books for Learning How To Manage Efficiently
10- Radical Candor
Quick info
Are you exhausted or overwhelmed by management? Do you sometimes feel lost trying to make sense of it? Then, your solution lies within this book, my friend.
Radical Candor provides a handy guide for those who feel the same way as you do. It’s written for bosses and those in charge of bosses. Built on the author’s years of experience, the book manages to provide actionable lessons to the audience, showing how managers succeed while keeping their sanity and humanity, how they grow to love their job, and how they manage to create an environment where people love working too.
Author biography
Kim Scoot is the co-founder and the CEO of Radical Candor Inc, which is a software company that builds tools primarily for managers. Previously, she was a member of the faculty at Apple University and Youtube, Doubleclick Online Sales, and Operations at Google. She’s the successful author of Radical Candor: How To Be a Kickass Boss without Losing your Humanity, to be published by St Martin’s Press next year.
Why should you have it?
This book is built around a very strong and impactful framework that discusses the practical advice and examples given by the author. If you’re looking for a guide that won’t waste your time, you can stick with this one since it’s a must-read for everyone who has to practice communication with other people at all. Many people have also shared their positive experiences with this work, highlighting many passages and sharing them with their co-workers.
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11- It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work
Quick info
It Doesnāt Have to Be Crazy at Work is a wonderful bestseller that provides the readers with a fresh path to working efficiently and productively. I really love this book because it takes on a mindful, calm approach to management issues. Long hours of working, excessive workload, lack of sleep, and all that. Are they familiar to you? Well, they shouldn’t be. The author, through this book, reveals that the answer isn’t putting in more hours and effort. Instead, it’s less waste and fewer distractions, and more efficient work as a consequence.
Author biography
Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37signals, a Chicago-based company that’s primarily focusing on building practical and web-based tools. He’s also a Le Mans class-winning racing driver, best-selling author, a frequent podcast guest, and a man devoted to his family.
He writes regularly on HEY World.
Why should you have it?
If you’re having problems specifically related to management issues, this book can help you build a different approach that’s healthier and more practical. If you choose to give it a shot, you’ll be able see that most of the things you thought were necessary for productive work actually are not. They might even be what’s putting you down, making you feel stressed and anxious.
So, I suggest you read this beautiful piece of work that’s highly likely to make you start celebrating the calmness within work schedules.
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12- The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Quick info
The Lean Startup is here to change the way businesses are built, and new products are created & launched in the market. It’s here to prevent startups from failing because many failure types are often preventable in this field.
This book is a must-read primarily for founders since it allows them to reduce product failures by practicing new ideas and methods; it’s full of actionable hints to avoid product-learning errors, catch the early signals from the market through efficient learning, and make a decision whether to do that or do this and achieve a sustainable business as a result.
Author biography
Eric Ries was born on September 22, 1978. He’s an American entrepreneur, blogger, and the author of The Lean Startup. He is also the author of The Startup Way, a book on entrepreneurial management.
After graduation, Eric moved to Silicon Valley in 2001 to work as a software engineer with There, Inc. He worked with this firm until the eventual fail. He spends his time doing research, helping teams, and regularly blogging.
Why should you have it?
This book possesses a unique approach that mainly consists of rapid scientific experimentation, lessons from lean manufacturing, validated learning, and several counter-intuitive practices that help teams shorten product development processes.
Instead of wasting your time exposing you to extreme business plans, this book offers you a unique way to test your company’s vision regularly, to adapt and make the required adjustments at the right time. With the help of this book, you’ll be able to take a deeper look into the scientific approaches to creating and organizing successful startups and be a part of the most successful founders in the 21st century.
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Final Word
So that was my list of the best SaaS books you should read this year. I hope you also find them helpful and educational as much as I did. Enjoy.
