10 Best Product Development Books for Startups

Getting your product right and verifying product market fit is one of the biggest challenges most beginner startup founders and entrepreneurs face daily. You’ve likely heard the phrase, “build it, and they will come,” but this isn't entirely the full truth when it comes to business in the real world.

While it may work for some lucky founders, most have to put in the work upfront to ensure our products solve a major problem or need their market has, and that said market is willing to take them up on their offer, get out their credit card, and purchase products.

Below, you’ll find some of the best product development books for startups available today. Use these books and resources to guide you through the product development process and learn from the mistakes of those who successfully created products before you.

Also Recommended: Check out our list of the best startup books.

“The Lean Startup” is the perfect business and product development book for startups, as it walks you through the entire process of building a successful organization from start to finish.

This book is divided into three sections discussing vision, steering, and accelerating your business. In the first part, you’ll learn about your vision for your startup and how you can define it, what you need to know to implement it, and what experiments you can run to improve your processes and strategies. In the second section, you’ll learn about steering your business forward in the right direction, including testing, measuring, and pivoting as required. Finally, the final section of this book will go into accelerating your business by batching tasks, growing, adapting to your marketplace, and innovating.

“Hooked” is a book dedicated to answering a seemingly simple question: how do companies create successful products that people do not want to put down? If you’ve ever dreamed of creating products your target customers absolutely adore, this book is the perfect solution.

Nir Eyal begins by discussing the habit zone, triggers, and actions and how you can implement each of these aspects into your product design. You’ll then learn about variable reward and investment and go over several case studies about massively successful products that implemented the techniques discussed here.

“Sprint” is a book for entrepreneurs to help them determine where they should place their efforts daily for optimal results and business performance. This process, called the “design sprint,” allows your company to rapidly progress from problem to functional prototype to tested solution using a simple five-day process.

Knapp, Zeratsky, and Kowitz make this book very straightforward without any “fluff,” walking you through their process straight away. You’ll learn about setting the stage, determining what problem you’re going to solve, and then going through your own “design sprint” to come up with a test solution more quickly than you ever thought possible.

“The Lean Product” is the ultimate guide for startup founders who are interested in building products customers love and can’t put down. You’ll begin by learning about the core concepts of product design and development, the lean product design process to rapidly developing products, identifying customer needs, defining your value proposition, specifying your minimum viable product (MVP), creating a prototype of your MVP, testing your MVP with real customers, and then iterating and improving to create great product-market fit.

“Product Leadership” is all about stewarding a product from concept to launch without any significant delays or hiccups in the process. Authors Martin Eriksson and Nate Walkingshaw discuss product leaders, product management, why product leadership is so important and relevant today, and what it takes to be a great product leader in your organization. In the book's second half, you’ll begin learning about the formula for product success, hiring product leaders, and how product leadership applies differently to startups, emerging organizations, and large enterprises.

Looking for more book recommendations? We asked startup founders to share their favorite books on entrepreneurship, and here's what they said.

“The Four Steps to the Epiphany” is a bestselling classic that has helped launch thousands of startups. The tactics and strategies for product development within this book are perfect for entrepreneurs who want to follow a proven process to create products that grab the attention of their marketplace and work effectively.

Steve Blank begins by reviewing the ideal product development model and walking you through “the four steps to an epiphany.” In the following sections, you’ll implement these strategies and go through a customer discovery process, develop your market hypothesis, test and qualify your hypothesis, and then jump into customer validation. Once you’ve been able to validate your product idea successfully, only then do you dive into actually building your product and making your product vision a reality.

“Crossing the Chasm” is a resource jam-packed with information on how you can bring cutting-edge products to larger markets. Author Geoffrey A. Moore goes over the high-tech marketing illusion, what you should be doing with your high-tech marketing, how you can “cross the chasm” into selling disruptive products, and the exact steps you need to take to ensure your product is a success among mainstream customers and the broader marketplace for years to come.

Marty Cagan’s “Inspired” is a book that explores how today’s most successful technology companies, such as Netflix, Facebook, Google, and Tesla, design and deploy their products to earn the love and support of billions of users all over the globe.

Readers begin by learning a few lessons from these top technology companies and then jump into the common ideas and patterns behind every great product. Cagan then dives into startups and getting the product-market fit right, as well as the root causes of failed products and what can be done to avoid these pitfalls. You'll learn about various product development roles in a company, supporting roles, and everything you need to know about managing and creating product roadmaps.

“Start at the End” is a practical approach to designing services and products that change customer behavior and result in a flurry of satisfied customers that don’t hesitate to come your way.

This book begins by discussing the basics of behavior change, including the intervention design process, insight validation, behavioral statements, pressure mapping, pressure validation, intervention design and selection, ethical checks, and test validation. These concepts combine to form the essence of this innovative product design process: “starting at the end.” In the second half of the book, Matt Wallaert covers advanced behavior change, including priming, mediation, moderation, optimum cognition, uniqueness and belonging, inhibiting pressures, competing behaviors, and several mini-case studies to show these concepts in action.

“Intercom on Product Management” is a book written by the team at Intercom, a San Francisco startup that has seen rapid exponential growth since its inception. Since Intercom was founded in 2011, the core team has continued to explore approaches to the product development challenges they faced. This resulted in epiphanies and innovations in product development processes, including during product evaluation, implementing new features, choosing which features to build over others, and getting customers to use new features instead of leaving them to the wayside and using what they’re already familiar with.

There’s no better way to learn than from an experienced team who has undergone the software product development process before, especially if you want to avoid all of their mistakes and pitfalls when building your own incredible products.