I wish I could work one-on-one with every product ops person who reaches out to me.
The conversations usually start the same way: “We’re struggling with X, and I don’t know where to start.” Maybe it’s engineering velocity, or misaligned priorities, or a team that can’t seem to ship anything meaningful. They’re stuck, and they need help now.
When I consult with teams, a huge part of my job is pattern matching. I recognize what they’re going through because I’ve seen it before—or lived it myself. Then I surface the right framework, the right question, or the right mental model at exactly the moment they need it.
This reading list is my attempt to scale that.
Most book lists organize by topic or author, which works fine when you’re browsing. But when you’re in crisis mode—when your team is struggling and you need answers—you don’t have time to read twelve leadership books to find the one chapter that applies to your situation.
So I’ve organized these books differently. Instead of categories like “strategy” or “leadership,” I’ve grouped them by the specific challenge you’re facing right now. Each book has shaped how I approach product ops work, and I want to help you find the one that will get you unstuck today.
Find your current pain point, grab that book, and get moving.
I’m just getting started in product ops
New to product ops? Start here. These books will help you understand what the role actually is, how to structure your work, and what “good” looks like when you’re building systems for your product team.
Product Operations by Melissa Perri, Denise Tilles
Read this when: You just got hired into a product ops role and need to figure out what you’re actually supposed to do.
This is the book on product operations. If you’re trying to understand what your job is, how to organize your team, or what projects fit underneath the product ops umbrella, start here. Melissa and Denise lay out the fundamentals clearly—what product ops owns, how it connects to product strategy, and how to measure success.
I did a full book review if you want more detail on whether it’s right for you.
Product Roadmaps Relaunched by C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, Michael Connors
Read this when: You have operations experience but not product experience, or you’re coming from a feature factory and want to see what good looks like.
Roadmapping is a perennial product ops challenge—everyone wants visibility, but most roadmaps become either useless Gantt charts or wish lists that don’t get updated.
This book shows you what modern, outcome-focused roadmaps actually look like. It’s especially valuable if you’re trying to move your organization away from feature factory habits toward more autonomous teams. I’ve used this book more than once to help convince leadership that there’s a better way to do roadmaps—and it works because the examples are concrete and practical.
True story: I had loaned this book out to a colleague when COVID hit and so never got it back. Bought another copy for my shelf because it’s a permanent part of my reference library.
I want to improve team delivery
Teams move slowly for dozens of reasons—unclear requirements, too much work in progress, misaligned incentives between product and engineering. But often the bottleneck isn’t the people, it’s the system they’re working in. These books help you see the system clearly so you can fix it.
Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim
Read this when: Your leadership keeps asking “why does it take so long to build good software?”
This is the book that made me question many truisms I thought I knew about software delivery. It’s filled with actual data about how high-performing engineering teams work, and it will make you uncomfortable—in a good way.
One of the most controversial findings: code reviews don’t meaningfully improve code quality when measured by bugs in production. This raises an awkward question: what’s the actual purpose of code reviews? Fair warning: quote this finding too enthusiastically to your engineering partners and you’ll make some people angry. (Speaking for a friend.)
The Goal by Eliyahu M Goldratt, Jeff Cox
Read this when: Work seems to pile up in certain places while other teams sit idle. You feel like you’re in the land of “hurry up and wait”.
Every business school grad has read “The Goal.” It’s not about software at all—it’s about manufacturing plants and systems and how work flows through them. And yes, it’s extraordinarily tacky. The framing story is painfully dated.
But here’s why it matters: it teaches you to see bottlenecks. Once you understand the Theory of Constraints, you’ll spot them in your backlog, your review process, your deployment pipeline. You’ll learn to prioritize not by what seems to be on fire, but by what’s blocking everything else. This book is the most painless way to develop this critical skill.
I am trying to create strategic alignment
You know that feeling when everyone agrees in the meeting, but then each team ends up pointing a different way? That’s the alignment problem. It’s not that people don’t care—it’s that alignment requires more than good intentions. You need shared language, clear priorities, and systems that keep everyone pointed in the same direction.
Radical Focus by Christina R Wodtke
Read this when: Your team sets OKRs every quarter and then immediately forgets about them.
Every product ops person eventually gets asked to “fix the OKR process,” and there’s no better book for this than Christina’s. It’s a short, fantastically written read that shows you what makes OKRs actually work—not just how to set them, but how to use them weekly to drive strategy and team productivity.
The book will make you think differently about how you spend time with your team. Fair warning: I’ve never quite been able to live up to the vision Christina paints here. But knowing that kind of alignment is possible? That keeps me trying.
I’m struggling with building product culture
Culture problems are the hardest to diagnose because everyone experiences them differently. One person says “we don’t trust each other,” another says “leadership keeps changing direction,” and someone else complains about misaligned incentives. These books help you see the patterns underneath the symptoms so you can actually fix what’s broken. and of course, long-time readers will know that I think that product operations and product culture are nearly synonymous
The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle
Read this when: Team dynamics just aren’t clicking and people don’t seem to trust each other.
This book taught me what psychological safety actually means—and showed me all the ways I was accidentally undermining it as a product leader. It’s easy to look at our own behavior and think we’re doing the right thing. This book is a wake-up call about how hard it actually is to create environments where people trust each other.
If you’re dealing with teams that can’t seem to cooperate or relationships that need repair, start here.
Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet
Read this when: You’re trying to turn around a struggling team or misaligned organization.
Turn the Ship Around has become one of my most recommended books. It’s about a nuclear submarine commander who transformed one of the worst-performing crews in the Navy into one of the best—by completely rethinking how leadership works.
The insight I carry everywhere: it’s not just about the words you say or the systems you build. It’s about incentive structures. The book teaches you how to spot when incentives aren’t aligned with goals—which happens constantly in product ops. Product wants one thing, engineering is measured on another, and everyone wonders why nothing works.
This book helped me identify those misalignments and fix them. It’s been a hugely influential book for my ability to catalyze change across a company.
I need to expand my thinking
Some problems resist every obvious solution. You’ve tried the standard approaches, talked to everyone involved, and still can’t figure out what’s actually wrong. These books teach you how to reframe problems so you can see what you’ve been missing.
Images of Organization by Gareth Morgan
Read this when: You’re trying to make sense of an organization or behavior that makes no logical sense on the surface.
John Cutler recommended this book to me, and as I read it, I started to understand how John can come up with such unique perspectives on classic product challenges. It teaches you to look at one situation through multiple lenses—political, ecological, mechanical, cultural—and shows how each lens reveals different truths about what’s actually happening.
My copy is covered in highlights where I’m connecting dots between concepts. For instance, looking at a product organization through a political lens versus an ecosystem lens reveals completely different intervention points.
Fair warning: this is the most academic book on this list. It’s long, dense, and not a weekend read. But if you’re a nerd like me who loves systems thinking, you’ll be blown away by the depth and quality of the writing.
Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais
Read this when: You’re reorganizing product teams and can’t figure out the right structure.
I’ve been pulled into more product team reorganizations than I can count, and this book provides the frameworks that make those reorgs actually work. It breaks down four fundamental team types and shows you how they should interact—which sounds simple until you realize how many reorgs fail because teams are structured wrong or have the wrong interaction patterns.
The book’s real gift is showing you the trade-offs. Want faster delivery? You’ll sacrifice some knowledge sharing. Want deeper expertise? You’ll slow down cross-team projects. There’s never one correct way to structure a product team, and this book helps you make those trade-offs consciously instead of accidentally.
I just need to stop thinking about work
Sometimes the best thing you can do for your product ops practice is to completely step away from it.
We spend all day optimizing systems and solving other people’s problems. My brain sometimes needs a break. These books have nothing to do with product operations, won’t make you a better strategist, and definitely won’t help you fix your roadmapping process. Grab one of them as your fireside read over the winter holidays and just enjoy.
Horse by Geraldine Brooks
Read this when: You need something that reminds you why storytelling matters.
This novel weaves together three timelines around a single racehorse, touching on art, ambition, and America’s complicated racial history. It’s the kind of book that makes you think about how we tell stories about the past. It’s beautifully written and will pull you completely out of your work brain.
Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
Read this when: You need something that feels like a hug.
I read this when dealing with overwhelming and overpowering grief, and it gave me something I didn’t know I needed—a story about messy, complicated people trying their best and mostly failing in charming ways. It’s about a bank robbery and strangers who end up stuck together. Saying more would spoil it. Just know that it’s funny, surprising, and will probably make you both laugh and cry in a good way.
One more thing before you go
Here’s what I’ve learned after recommending these books to dozens of teams: reading them isn’t enough.
The product ops managers who get the most value are the ones who treat these books as starting points for conversation. They read a chapter, then gather their team to debate whether it applies to their context. They highlight the parts that resonate and openly question the parts that don’t.
So yes, find the book that matches your current challenge and read it. But then do the harder work: figure out what needs to change in your specific situation, and make it happen.
And if you want to talk through what you’re trying? I’m always up for that conversation. Reach out—I’d love to hear what’s working (and what isn’t) in your context.