Five books to step up your product design skills
I know that the internet is full of that kind of articles. But I find most of the books people usually suggest too general and entry-level. ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ and ‘Don’t make me think’ are influential, but do they help when you need to get the work done? I like a structured and pragmatic approach to design. And the books I’ll share with you contain practical tools to help you become a better product designer and creative.
The Practice: Shipping Creative Work
This book is not a dedicated product design book, but it influenced me a lot in how I build my creative process and routines. Here are some great ideas I highlighted from this book:
Most people focus on the outcomes of the work and not the process. But it’s more beneficial to focus on your daily practice, show up and ship the work every time. The practice leads to great outcomes.
Creativity is a skill.
The definition of creative work: “Creative work is the generous act of making things better by doing something that might not work.”
The Jobs To Be Done Playbook
Jobs to be done framework needs no introduction to experienced product professionals. But this book, in particular, is worth checking out because of how methodically everything is laid out there. It can be used as a starting point for those new to JTBD and a go-to reference for experienced people to apply the framework across every stage of the development process.
Mapping experiences
Yet another great book by Jim Kalbach. It is extremely useful if you want to create a single easy-to-adopt source of truth to align your team and company. It covers general principles of mapping experiences, workshop techniques, and a detailed manual for all the primary mapping tools: service blueprints, experience maps, CJMs, mental model diagrams, ecosystem maps, etc. More to it, the book contains a plethora of real-life examples.
Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
Lean Analytics is a must-have if you want to understand how to measure the success of startups and how startups operate in general. It describes primary business models, stages of a startup, and metrics you need to consider in different cases. There are a lot of examples and insights, but it’s more of a mind-setting book than a practical manual on how to set up the analytics ecosystem. As for me, this book would be most useful when you switch domains and you need to quickly dive into specifics of how the company you started working for operates.
By the way, there is no use of analytics without great visualization. As a bonus, I recommend you read ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’ to know how to present your findings better or read others’ data.
Collaborative product design: Help Any Team Build a Better Experience
I recommend reading Collaborative product design to every product designer. Although it’s not very popular online, it’s a true gem. This book is a go-to reference for every stage of product design, from ideation and research to prototyping and testing. It gives a pragmatic approach to how a product designer can help a team build better products through collaboration and leadership. Here are a few other things that I would highlight:
Every exercise is collaboration ready so you can set up workshops without additional preparation.
It is written in plain English, without too many design buzzwords, which makes it easy to explain to non-design colleagues.
There are a lot of practical frameworks that break down sketching, wireframing, and prototyping stages, where designers usually rely on their intuition and feelings rather than logic and process.
As this book focuses on collaboration, additionally, you may skim through ‘Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers’ to learn the general principles of conducting workshops and many workshop examples.
A book is the number one source of fundamental design knowledge for me. But even though many of them have a lot of real-life examples and are based on the author’s expertise, they are still describing ideal scenarios, which usually don’t work as planned when you apply them. The key is practice: use your knowledge, make mistakes, learn, adjust, iterate, and you’ll become a better product designer.