My 5 Most Influential Books

Sprint

Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky & Braden Kowitz · 2016

Sprint walks through the five-day process the authors refined at Google Ventures: map the problem, sketch competing solutions, decide, build a realistic prototype, and test it with real users, all in one week. I picked it up because I kept seeing teams spend months debating ideas they could have tested in days.

Sprint’s objective is simple: create a repeatable process that recognizes all possible hurdles, uses teamwork and creativity to attack those hurdles, and move forward in the most effective possible manner. The book provides various methodologies and tools one can utilize to consistently move a project from discovery to deployment.

With this in mind, Sprint has one large caveat: it’s micromanagement to the extreme. This book dictates exactly how an individual spends their entire week from one hour to the next. And while the book suggests the structure can vary to better fit your environment and situation, the main hurdle with this approach is it requires a dedicated team to focus on a specific project. If individuals of your team are committed to several projects at once, for example, this methodology falls short.

That said, I have no doubt that the exercises in this book are effective and useful. Even if one can’t adhere to the entire protocol with perfection, there are so many useful strategies that still affect my day-to-day.

Start With Why

Simon Sinek · 2009

Start With Why asks why some leaders and organizations inspire lasting loyalty while others with the same resources don’t. Sinek’s answer is the Golden Circle: the ones who inspire communicate from the inside out, starting with why they do something before getting to how or what.

Start With Why is an extension of Sinek’s 2009 TED talk on the examination of how great leaders inspire action. The book provides more detail of how these leaders think and presents examples of how their mindsets have affected their coworkers and businesses. This book exposes such a simple principle and has deeply affected my way of thinking.

The Lean Startup

Eric Ries · 2011

The Lean Startup treats every new product as an experiment run under heavy uncertainty, whether it’s two people in a garage or a team inside a large enterprise. Ries’s build-measure-learn loop, shipping a minimum viable product, measuring real behavior instead of vanity metrics, then deciding whether to change course, gave me a vocabulary for how I already wanted to work. Much of how I think about MVPs today traces back to this book.

Lean UX

Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden · 2nd ed., 2016

Lean UX brings Lean and Agile thinking to design: stop polishing deliverables, frame the work as hypotheses, and test them with real users in short cycles alongside the rest of the product team. It’s the book I reach for most in practice. The hypothesis prioritization I run with teams, including on the Centene Recovery Platform, comes straight from it.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

Al Ries & Jack Trout · 1993

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing boils decades of campaign wins and failures down to short, blunt rules, like the law of leadership and the law of line extension. It’s a quick read, and it changed how I think about positioning. Most of the laws apply just as well to products as they do to brands.

On a related note, Al Ries & Jack Trout released a second book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. While the read was still interesting, it is notably disappointing when compared to the original. Ironically, releasing the second book breaks law #12 of the original book, the law of line extension. To quote the authors, “violate them at your own risk.”