Books about product development and building effective teams

Looking for books to read during your christmas break? Look no further, here is a list of great agile related book that I can recommend to everyone who wants to broaden their knowledge about product development and making effective teams and or organization.
You can get these books instantly via the Amazon kindle book shop.

The Lean Machine: How Harley-Davidson Drove Top-Line Growth and Profitability with Revolutionary Lean Product Development

by: Dantar P. Oosterwal

The Lean Machine serves best as a set of tips for the project manager, but executives can also benefit from Oosterwal’s wisdom when they are trying to build a top-performing team of product developers or engineers.

 

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
by: Eric Ries
The Lean Startup is a foundational must-read for founders, enabling them to reduce product failures by bringing structure and science to what is usually informal and an art. It provides actionable ways to avoid product-learning mistakes, rigorously evaluate early signals from the market through validated learning, and decide whether to persevere or to pivot, all challenges that heighten the chance of entrepreneurial failure.

The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth
by: Eric Ries

In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries laid out the practices of successful startups – building a minimal viable product, customer-focused and scientific testing based on a build-measure-learn method of continuous innovation, and deciding whether to persevere or pivot. In The Startup Way, he turns his attention to an entirely new group of organizations: established enterprises like iconic multinationals GE and Toyota, tech titans like Amazon and Facebook, and the next generation of Silicon Valley upstarts like Airbnb and Twilio.

Switch: How to change things when change is hard
by: Dan Heath and Chip Heath

The Heath brothers address motivating employees, family members, and ourselves in their analysis of why we too often fear change. Change is not inherently frightening, but our ability to alter our habits can be complicated by the disjunction between our rational and irrational minds: the self that wants to be swimsuit-season ready and the self that acquiesces to another slice of cake anyway. The trick is to find the balance between our powerful drives and our reason. The authors’ lessons are backed up by anecdotes that deal with such things as new methods used to reform abusive parents, the revitalization of a dying South Dakota town, and the rebranding of megastore Target. Through these lively examples, the Heaths speak energetically and encouragingly on how to modify our behaviors and businesses. This clever discussion is an entertaining and educational must-read for executives and for ordinary citizens looking to get out of a rut.

The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development
by: Donald G. Reinertsen

This book challenges an awful lot of fashionable ideas on improving product development processes. It provides a vast number of very solid principles that could make a big difference for almost any product development organization, from beginners to the most advanced. It offers a fundamentally different way of thinking about product development processes.

 

 Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational
by: Karen Martin and Mike Osterling

Value Stream Mapping is a practical, how-to guide that helps decision-makers improve value stream efficiency in virtually any setting, including construction, energy, financial service, government, healthcare, R&D, retail, and technology. It gives you the tools to address a wider range of important VSM issues than any other such book, including the psychology of change, leadership, creating teams, building consensus, and charter development.

Leading Change
by: John P. Kotter

John Kotter’s eight-step process for managing change with positive results has become the foundation for leaders and organizations across the globe. By outlining the process every organization must go through to achieve its goals, and by identifying where and how even top performers derail during the change process, Kotter provides a practical resource for leaders and managers charged with making change initiatives work. Leading Change is widely recognized as his seminal work and is an important precursor to his newer ideas on acceleration published in Harvard Business Review.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
by: Daniel H. Pink

Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of our lives. He demonstrates that while the old-fashioned carrot-and-stick approach worked successfully in the 20th century, it’s precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today’s challenges. In Drive, he reveals the three elements of true motivation:

• Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives
• Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters
• Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

Tribal Unity: Getting from Teams to Tribes by Creating a One Team Culture
by: Em Campbell-Pretty, Gene Kim and Steve Farber

Tribal Unity is a real world, practical guide, for leaders committed to making their organisation a great place to work. Based on the true story of how one inspiring leader transformed a highly toxic organisational culture into an internationally recognised case study of success, Tribal Unity shares proven patterns that are revolutionising the way teams of teams connect and perform.

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
by: Seth Godin

It’s human nature to seek out tribes, be they religious, ethnic, economic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. Social media gives anyone who wants to make a difference the tools to do so.

With his signature wit and storytelling flair, Godin presents the three steps to building a tribe: the desire to change things, the ability to connect a tribe, and the willingness to lead.

 

Creating Great Teams: How Self-Selection Lets People Excel
by: Sandy Mamoli and David Mole

People are happiest and most productive if they can choose what they work on and who they work with. Self-selecting teams give people that choice. Build well-designed and efficient teams to get the most out of your organization, with step-by-step instructions on how to set up teams quickly and efficiently. You’ll create a process that works for you, whether you need to form teams from scratch, improve the design of existing teams, or are on the verge of a big team re-shuffle.

Scrum Mastery
by: Geoff Watts

The basics of being a ScrumMaster are fairly straightforward: At face value all a ScrumMaster needs to do is facilitate the Scrum process and remove impediments. But being a great ScrumMaster, one who truly embodies the principles of servant-leadership and helps move a team to the high performance levels possible with Scrum, is much harder and much more elusive.

 

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
by: Jeff Sutherland and JJ Sutherland

For those who believe that there must be a more agile and efficient way for people to get things done, here is a brilliantly discursive, thought-provoking book about the leadership and management process that is changing the way we live.

 

 

Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability: An Introduction
by: Daniel Vacanti

“When will it be done?”

That is probably the first question your customers ask you once you start working on something for them. Think about how many times you have been asked that question. How many times have you ever actually been right?

We can debate all we want whether this is a fair question to ask given the tremendous amount of uncertainty in knowledge work, but the truth of the matter is that our customers are going to inquire about completion time whether we like it or not. Which means we need to come up with an accurate way to answer them. The problem is that the forecasting tools that we currently utilize have made us ill-equipped to provide accurate answers to reasonable customer questions.
Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business
by: David J. Anderson and Donald G. Reinertsen

Kanban is becoming a popular way to visualize and limit work-in-progress in software development and information technology work. Teams around the world are adding kanban around their existing processes to catalyze cultural change and deliver better business agility. This book answers the questions: What is Kanban? Why would I want to use Kanban? How do I go about implementing Kanban? How do I recognize improvement opportunities and what should I do about them?

Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban
by: Henrik Kniberg

We start with an organization in desperate need of a new way of doing things and finish with a group of sixty, all working in sync to develop a scalable, complex system. You’ll walk through the project step by step, from customer engagement, to the daily “cocktail party,” version control, bug tracking, and release. In this honest look at what works–and what doesn’t–you’ll find out how to:

• Make quality everyone’s business, not just the testers.
• Keep everyone moving in the same direction without micromanagement.
• Use simple and powerful metrics to aid in planning and process improvement.
• Balance between low-level feature focus and high-level system focus.
• You’ll be ready to jump into the trenches and streamline your own development process.

Crossing the Chasm
by: Geoffrey A. Moore

In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore shows that in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle – which begins with innovators and moves to early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards – there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. While early adopters are willing to sacrifice for the advantage of being first, the early majority waits until they know that the technology actually offers improvements in productivity. The challenge for innovators and marketers is to narrow this chasm and ultimately accelerate adoption across every segment.

The Art of Business Value
by: Mark Schwartz and Gene Kim

Do you really understand what business value is? Information technology can and should deliver business value. But the Agile literature has paid scant attention to what business value means—and how to know whether or not you are delivering it. This problem becomes ever more critical as you push value delivery toward autonomous teams and away from requirements “tossed over the wall” by business stakeholders. An empowered team needs to understand its goal!

 

Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
by: Laszlo Bock

A compelling manifesto with the potential to change how we work and live, Work Rules! offers both a philosophy of the new world of work and a blueprint for attracting the most spectacular talent and ensuring the brightest and best prosper. The way we work is changing – are you?

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