💥 5 must read books

Your career advancement depends on owning the frameworks, not just running the meetings. If you rely on gut feel, you’re not leading; you’re just paying a tax on confusion.

These five books are not just for reading; they are actionable playbooks that I read and used to leverage and engineer dominance, imposing a ruthless internal rigor that created unstoppable market velocity.

Stop managing activity.

Start commanding unconventional value:

1) Escaping the Build Trap Melissa Perri: The market demands outcomes, not outputs. Using this, I led a Change Management initiative, transforming a product group into the firm’s most powerful execution engine.

Use it to lead a quarterly P&L review and quit funding “busy work.” This book is the blueprint for shifting your culture from feature factory to strategic asset.

2) Inspired Marty Cagan: Forget roadmaps filled with features. I used its core principles to own the entire 0-to-1 Product Lifecycle of a flagship ERP SaaS product, launching it and successfully scaling it to over $25M in ARR.

Map its principles directly to your strategy. This is the core education you missed in business school.

3) Hooked Nir Eyal: Your retention metrics are a joke if you don’t understand user psychology. Leveraging its model, I created a Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy that slashed customer churn by 20% across a 1M+ user base.

This unlocks the psychological cheat code to building habit-forming products.

4) The Lean Product Playbook Dan Olsen: Stop over-engineering. I leveraged this framework to achieve 98% on-time delivery for all major product rollouts, helping to unify disparate legacy platforms into a single, scalable technology stack.

It enforces the speed the market demands. This framework teaches you to remove 80% of the waste costing you time and political capital.

5) Build Tony Fadell: Leadership is a mindset, not a title. I used these lessons to drive a 200% year-over-year Revenue Growth by leading a complete operational overhaul.

This is the leadership wisdom required to secure multi-million dollar stakeholder alignment and stamp out mediocrity.

What is the single most impactful book you recommend to a new leader?

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Richard Ewing is a Product Executive and the creator of The Product Economist framework. He serves as a Strategic Advisor to B2B SaaS organizations, helping leaders audit their roadmaps for capital efficiency and prevent “model collapse” in their business models.

Stop guessing. Start auditing.

#ProductManagement #ProductLeadership #SaaS #ExecutiveLeadership #AIStrategy

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