 In this video, you're going to find out about four essential product books in the sort of design and innovation space that you have not read yet. So the clip you're about to hear is from the Product Breakfast Club podcast, a podcast that myself and Jake Knapp, the author of Sprint, run every Monday morning. So do check that out if you have a podcast app, just search for Product Breakfast Club. What you're going to hear is user researcher Amar Khalifa, he's works at AJ & Smart, and Jake talking about the four essential product books. And I really hope there's a couple of things in here you haven't heard of, a couple of books you haven't read yet. Do let us know in the comments if there's any other books that we should be thinking about for product designers or UX designers. Hope you enjoy this clip. Have a good one. Books give you really like structured knowledge, whereas you can read lots and lots of articles and you don't have a cohesive story in the end. So I've really been like getting back into books and like changing that ratio of books to articles that I'm reading. Just because I feel like after I've read a book, I actually have the full story in my head. I can talk about it more eloquently. I can communicate the ideas more, there are less gaps in the knowledge. So yeah, let's talk about some books. One question that I wanted to ask you in the last show that we did together, which was the first time I spoke to you, I had like, I was super curious as to what were the books that influenced you in the writing of Sprint. So let's talk about that. Sure. Yeah. So to me, it's interesting what stuff stuck in my head that influenced my thinking because I've read a lot of different kinds of business books. And we talk about on this show, we'll talk about business books a lot, but they're usually business books that are in the genre of the thing that you're trying to accomplish. For example, John talks a lot about hacking growth. That's a book he loves. And he's reading that book because he wants to grow AJ and smart. He wants to help the businesses that he's working with grow. It's like a one-to-one connection to the thing that he's trying to accomplish. And most business books we read, they're like that, you know, radical candor. Oh, you're a manager or or if you're just like, you're dealing with people at work, I'm going to read this book so I can learn how to do that thing better. And the thing that's kind of, to me, was kind of funny looking back on the Sprint process and the things that I think really informed my thinking beforehand, most of those were not actually about products. It wasn't like, oh, here's like a great way to do product design, product development, how to validate your business, things like that. It's not that I wasn't reading those, but I think the things that inspired me the most were slightly like adjacent or they were an interesting idea from somewhere else. So with that elaborate preamble. Yeah, by the way, like Jonathan has made those required readings for everyone at Adrian Smart. We have like now five books that everyone should read. What are they? So Sprint by Sprint. Good. Is it on the list only once though? Because it should be like three or four spots. Yeah, yeah. I think that was an oversight. Okay, we'll talk to him when he comes back. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, Sprint is definitely on top of the list. And then there's the lean startup, power of moments and the two that you mentioned, hacking growth, radical candor. Is there one that I'm missing? How many was that? That's like 12, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's 12. Yeah, that's it. Well, that's a great set of books, although I haven't read radical candor or hacking growth yet. I'm still on kind of like a business book detox for a little while, but I'm going to come back and those will be on my list. So here's the books for me. First one actually is about product after that whole preamble. You and I were talking about it not long ago. It's Getting Real by 37 Signals. This is Jason Fried and David and Hannah Meyer Hansen. This book would later be reworked into a book called Rework. Pretty clever here in the early morning here in San Francisco. But anyway, that book is awesome. And I read that when I was working at Microsoft. So you can go, if you're listening to this and you have access to a computational device, some kind connect to the internet, you can get this book right now for free. Search for Getting Real 37 Signals. That's one word like 37 signals or Getting Real Basecamp. They'll probably get you there too. You're going to land on this page and you're going to find the PDF of this book just for free. They put it out there for free now. And it's dated, I don't know when that book came out, maybe 2006, maybe? 2006? Yeah. That's an old one. God, I've probably mentioned it on this show before, but I think it's safe to reemphasize how great this thing is and how influential my thinking. They were talking about how to build web 2.0 products. Web 2.0 is what we called websites that could actually have software kind of stuff happening in them, which was the wave that was sweeping the world in the early 2000s. And these guys just had a totally different take on how you should make decisions, how you should work together as a team, what you should put in your product and keep out. It was great. And I was just like, wow, I want to be working like this. Why aren't we working like this here? And it came while I was working on a project that we were trying to build like this touchscreen device with an app store kind of thing. And in hindsight, pretty good idea actually, but weren't even close to pulling it off or executing it and really frustrating project. And anyway, we're working on the iPhone, basically. Yeah, the Microsoft version of something that would have been, even if we had pulled it off, nowhere near as good. But yeah, but like, there's like a seed of like an interesting idea there. Anyway, this really kind of like woke me up to, wow, there are totally different ways of doing things than the way we're doing them here. And this is pretty interesting. So getting real was a big one for me. But then some of the other books that I think informed the design sprint process a lot are much less connected to products. So one of them is getting things done. So getting real. And then there's getting things done by David Allen. Oh, that's interesting. Yes. Have you read that? I think I've started it, but I never got around to finishing it. Okay, yeah. I mean, that's the way of nonfiction or self help books. It's not a very fun book to read, though. Well, yeah, it was quite dry. Sure. Yeah, it's a bit dry. I've actually read that book three times. So I have to say that like, I was way, way into it. It's really a whole book about how you should process things you have to do. And the thing that came out of that, that was really a huge deal for the sprint was thinking about breaking things down into like the physical actions that you do. If you have a big task to do in the example, I think he uses as taxes. And I might even talk about this in the sprint book that I hope that I remember to give a shout out to David Allen. The way he describes like you got to do your taxes, which yeah, maybe if you're listening to this and you're in Europe, it might not be any big deal. Maybe they do it for you for all I know. I think they do in some countries. The US, it's like a huge nightmare every year with all this paperwork. And when you know that you have to do taxes like that things on your list, you're like, God, this is going to be this huge hassle. So if you think about it that way, totally daunting, but if you just say what's the next physical action I need to take to move it forward, it's probably something much less daunting. Like I need to like collect my paperwork. I just need to like find the paperwork, not necessarily to even do anything about it yet. But if I just put on my list, like the next thing is for taxes is fine to the paperwork. Yeah, it's like a physical thing. I can picture like, Oh, I'll go to, you know, wherever that stuff is, my desk or like maybe have a file cabinet, I'll fish that stuff out. And then I'll have made progress. You just sort of go like that. Like you break down what are all the different physical actions it's going to take to get this thing done. And that idea to me was just like super powerful. Like, wow, you take a big thing, you break it down, you figure out what the components are, and it becomes more manageable. And so that notion, I started to think about that in my design work. I'm working at that time that I read that I was working at Microsoft, but in Carter, this is even before the other thing. And I just started thinking, okay, when I need to get something done, I'll start figuring out what the steps are over the years, because it would be still many years before I created the design sprint. This notion of little components was really powerful to me. So another thing that I read right around the time I started working at Google, maybe a little before, was actually it's funny, you should say things we read online versus like books, because this was an essay, although it eventually became a book, it's by a tool go on day. And I read it in the New Yorker. So New Yorker essays are like, they tend to be like a bit longer than your typical online like blog post or newsy article or like, here's a new study about something. But if you search for a tool go on day, gosh, I could like, I really need Google to help me spell that. Yeah, it's ATUL GAWA in DE. We'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, someone will put in the show notes. Someone will put it in the show notes. We don't know what New Yorker checklist. I think that would be the query. You're going to find this post from December 2nd, 2007. So I was at Google and it implies I started in January 2007, a life saving checklist, life saving checklist. He eventually wrote a book about this called the checklist manifesto. Okay, I know that book. Yeah. So if you want to read the checklist manifesto without reading the whole book, read a life saving checklist, which you can get for free on the New Yorker. And this article, and I've never read the checklist manifesto actually, so it might have much more, I'm sure it does have a lot of other good stuff in it. He's an awesome writer. But from reading this checklist thing, he's talking about basically in the article, there's this great story about having an airplane that was too complex to fly. And so they made a checklist for it, just to make sure the pilots and the crew would do all the necessary things. And then they were able to fly it. And this idea of the checklist, obviously, if you take a flight now, they're going through a pre-flight checklist. And we know it's important there. We know it works there with like a mechanical thing. And he was saying, he's a physician. So he was saying like, we need to do this in medicine. There's no reason why we can't have checklists and not make some of the dumb mistakes we make. But he said there's a challenge because we don't like the idea as physicians that we should have to follow a checklist. Like we ought to just know how to do it. And I read that and I was like, well, man, this is like building products, like we should have a checklist for things we do. But it feels like we shouldn't have to because we're experts, right? We know what we're doing. I started to just look for checklists everywhere. So those two ideas really paired well together. You break things down into small components. And then you make a checklist. And I was like, oh, this is cool. And around that same time, I had been exposed to these design thinking workshops where you're bringing people through steps to do a group brainstorm together and then use like dots to vote on the concepts from the group brainstorm. And I was like, oh, okay, so God, if you took a checklist and you broke down the components of like actually doing even like deeper work on a project, maybe you get this new kind of workshop, you know, there's like some power in all of those ideas. And the last one, not long after that, I read a book called Decisive. And it's by Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Power of Moments, which you mentioned earlier. And it's about how to make good decisions. One of the things in there was the importance of considering different alternatives and having multiple paths that you could try out. And so that was another thing that became really powerful for me in thinking about the design sprint was how can we make the best decisions possible throughout the process? And whenever possible, have multiple paths. And the only way you're really going to have multiple good paths is if people are allowed to think as individuals, not always have a discussion because discussions tend towards consensus or watering things down or compromise. But when you keep the thinking separate, you'll have more divergence and more competition that's according to this book that's you're going to have a better outcome in that way. So then was I was really like then consciously, I could see the checklist of the design sprint and I knew by experimenting, I could improve it. And I really started to think a lot about how to make those decisions as strong as possible. So those are some of the key books. And I think maybe the theme of those from my perspective is that they're kind of a little bit outside of the business world. They're close where they overlap a little, but they're a little outside. And I think that helped the design sprint be kind of different from what other people were doing. Yeah, it's so fascinating to hear you talk about this because like every time you were talking about one of these books, it made so much sense. I haven't read all these books, but I know the idea behind them, like getting things done and the checklist manifesto. And it's all like super obvious, the influence that they've had. And I really believe in like this idea that you're talking about of if you want to get better at design, the way to do that is not to just be only like in the design bubble, only reading design stuff. It's about like bringing stuff from outside of the design world. Because I mean, it happens naturally to just if you expose yourself to other ideas, I think you will naturally take like lessons from other places and try to apply them in your job. And because it just improves your thinking overall. Totally. And so many people, everybody's looking at the same stuff. Exactly. If you can look at different stuff, you are way ahead. And a lot of the other stuff you look at, it may not be useful, you know, but if you just read the required reading for your domain, you should pay attention to that stuff, but it's not all there for sure. Totally. I would have thought that the Lean Startup had some influence on the writing of Spring, just because they read so naturally like reading the Lean Startup. I read the Lean Startup after having read Sprint. And that book read almost like as a prequel to Sprint and the values of it and the way it approaches things. And the Sprint felt like a recipe book to the philosophy of the Lean Startup, almost like an applied thing. Did you read any like of Eric Reese's stuff even before he'd read the book or exposed to his ideas? I actually, I hadn't read the Lean Startup until I started working in the very early stages on Sprint. And it's not that that wasn't a really important concept, but that was just so infused in the way we talked about products at Google and working with startups. Like, I mean, I had probably sort of skimmed it or something, right? I studied the way it was written while writing Sprint. And there's a few books and actually like my main inspiration for like the writing, like actually like how the writing of the book was done is made to stick, which is another chip and dang. Oh, cool. I just started reading that. That's a great book. That's the first book I recommend to people who are in design actually, even though it's not about design, it's about telling compelling stories. But that is also what design is about. I looked a lot at like how they told stories in that book and how they also gave sort of practical methods you could use the Lean Startup because it had been so successful. And I was working with the same agent as Eric Reese. And there was a lot of thinking of like, why do we figure out what worked well about this book and what's made it so successful? And it is such a great book. But yeah, a lot of that stuff, it was just so in the vocabulary of the way people were working that I guess I got kind of immersed in it more so than learning it from the book. Whereas these other things, I don't mean to like take credit away from him for really like broadcasting that way of working and transforming the way people thought about businesses. But those other things, they were more foreign to me, those other books. And so they were more like, oh, wow, oh, geez, like this is like totally eye-opening. We each of those things when I encountered them. Whereas by the time I encountered the Lean Startup, I was just late to the game. Other people had read it or been doing it. And it wasn't as novel. No, and it makes a lot of sense that you say that because that was only my guess from the outside, just because I'm not in that world. But you working in Silicon Valley, probably like Eric Reese and what he was doing, other companies were already doing that. And Google was probably doing that. It's just that nobody had kind of put it in like nice little neat package and published it as a book maybe. But the practices were already there. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure how much was already there and how much was him packaging and articulating it. He did such a good job of that. It was so successful to the degree that I couldn't even tell you if the people I was working with got it from reading the Lean Startup or if they were already doing it because they were like so sold on it. And I say like if we're not sure, let's just give him credit. But I do think that for better for worse, I didn't really read a lot of books about design and product. Like I've never read the design of everyday things. And it's just there's no good reason why I haven't read it. It's just I just like I'm not that into learning about this stuff. Actually, there's like certain things that caught my attention and caught my interest. And there's a real downside to that because there are a lot of times when people would talk about things and I just wouldn't know. I wouldn't have the context or there's things about design I just don't know. But there's also an advantage to following the things that really excite you and really interest you, which is that you have room then for your own thoughts. And I think part of the thing that helped me was just having some space to try to craft my own ways of interpreting what was going on around me or using the tools that seemed exciting, even if they were from some different place. Whereas if I had just been doing and reading the same things everyone else did, it's harder to do things different. Totally. One thing you said about made to stick, which is a book that helps you present your ideas in a way that people will be receptive to them and that they will remember them. And I was reading that actually just because I got interested in the topic of copywriting and basically what the book is talking about, of how to deliver a message in a way that is easy for people to understand and that is memorable. And I had tried a few like copywriting books that are supposed to help you do that. And the thing is like, all these books are so dry, I couldn't get past the introduction. And I found that like as like such a giveaway test. It's pretty ironic for a book that's supposed to be teaching you how to hold people's attention. So yeah, I'm really enjoying that one right now. I'm going to look that up online and read it on the preview. Just do a dramatic reading of the book for the rest of the podcast. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we'll just do a page. But the first page is so great. I'm sure Jason should cut this out. Just put some elevator music. Oh man, made to stick. Why some ideas survive and others die by Chip and Dan Heath. Over a thousand reviews on Amazon. That's amazing. If you've listened to this and you've read Sprint, you should write a thousand reviews for us because it looks so badass. By Sprint. By Sprint. It has the best cover ever. Such a great cover. Actually our editor, Simon and Schuster on Sprint, edited Made to Stick. And he told us the story about how they did the cover and they tried all these different cover designs and they couldn't get anything that they like really liked. The guy, one of the brothers, the authors was like, basically just like put a piece of duct tape on like orange paper and was like, what about this? And they're like, oh, actually, it actually looks so good in person. Like that, that's that tape. It looks really, really good. It looks so good. I love this cover. I wanted Sprint to be orange because I love how it looks like a utility. This book, black and white text, they both pop on this like rich orange. The duct tape is just, oh, genius. Everything about this book is perfect. This is the best book ever. It's still like number 3000 on Amazon, which is crazy because it came out in 2007, like 12 years ago. It's just crushing. The other thing about Made to Stick, because you talked about this idea of like selling ideas or like communicating ideas, that's the other key to Sprint was from the beginning I had to convince people. I had to tell the story about why are we doing this? I had to convince first like my boss at Google to let me do this with my team that I was managing. And then like I had to over and over again convince teams and just like for 10 years I've been trying to like pitch design Sprints. I'm doing it right now, right? And Made to Stick was awesome for that. So let's look inside. The table of contents even is great because it has these little summaries. So introduction, what sticks? And then it has like little like phrases to remind you or like teas about what's in the chapter. So I'll just read those like teasers for the introduction. Kidney heist, movie popcorn, sticky equals understandable, memorable, and effective in changing thought or behavior. Halloween candy, six principles, S-U-C-C-E-S. The villain, curse of knowledge. It's hard to be a tapper. Creativity starts with templates. And actually creativity starts with templates. The lightning demos came from that idea in this book. Lightning demos in Sprint. I forgot about that. So yeah, I'm just plagiarizing basically. Damn it. They didn't do the first page in the preview and they're looking inside those jerks. I do have it actually on my Kindle. Do you want me to read it? Read it. Yeah. Yeah. Read it. Read it because it's so good. All right. All right. So here we go. So introduction. What sticks? A friend of a friend of ours is a frequent business traveler. Let's call him Dave. Dave was recently an atlantic city for an important meeting with clients. Afterward, he had some time to kill before his flight. So he went to a local bar for a drink. He had just finished one drink when an attractive woman approached and asked if she could buy him another one. He was surprised but flattered. Sure, he said, the woman walked to the bar and brought back two more drinks, one for her and one for him. He thanked her and took a sip. And that was the last thing he remembered. Rather, that was the last thing he remembered until he woke up, disoriented, lying in a hotel bathtub. His body submerged in ice. He looked around frantically, trying to figure out where he was and how he got there. Then he spotted a note. Don't move. Call 911. A cell phone rested on a small table beside the bathtub. He picked it up and called 911. His fingers numb and clumsy from the ice. The operator seemed oddly familiar with his situation. She said, sir, I want you to reach behind you slowly and carefully. Is there a tube protruding from your lower back? Anxious, he felt around behind him. Sure enough, there was a tube. The operator said, sir, don't panic, but one of your kidneys has been harvested. There's a ring of organ thieves operating in the city and they got to you. Paramedics are on the way. Don't move until they arrive. And so that's the end of the quote. That's so good. Imagine like the copy editing book that you might read to try to learn about something. That's right. And like the way they hook you with this one. Exactly. It's so good. They're showing you from the get go. Here's how you do it. And then they break down why that story has spread. It's an urban legend. Why something that's not true can spread like that. And that's what sold me on the book when I read it. It's like, yes, finally, like a book that actually can hook you in about communicating ideas. It's actually fun to read, which is so, so cool. Yeah. Anyway, God, I can't even remember what we were talking about, but by make time, by made to stick, I should say I'm so used to selling my own stuff by make time by spring by make time also. Yeah. What books have been influential for you? Oh my God. I don't know. Like off the top of my head. I like sprint, obviously. Of course. But actually, like to talk about reading books outside of the space that we're in, I just finished a book called fooled by randomness. This book, it's by a guy called Naseem Nicholas Taleb. And his name came up a few times when I was reading tools of Titans. And Tim Ferriss also like speaks very highly of this author. And actually, I think you might enjoy reading this book just because the author Naseem Taleb is actually very much into literature. And so the way that his book reads is like a collection of stories, not like a dry business book on the topic of randomness, because that's what's essentially the books talking about. And that book is basically just changed the way I view like patterns forever, because humans were like pattern recognition machines, you'll see like the face in a mountain that doesn't exist or like the thing on the moon or things like that. What I got basically from this book is it really like sharpened my thinking as to when I should think something is generalizable or when I should actually be digging for more and trying to like the whole idea of trying to disprove the theories that I've come up with rather than try to look for confirming evidence and all of these cognitive biases that people have when talking about things. And so without going like through the whole book, I could also like read chapter one just like we did. Do you think like we should just read one chapter from every book for the rest of the podcast? I think you should read the first page if you have it on your Kindle read the first page or maybe the first paragraph give us the first paragraph at least. So all right, I'll read the prologue say the name of the book again fooled by randomness by Naseem Nicholas Taleb. So prologue mosques in the cloud. This book is about luck disguised and perceived as non luck that is skill and more generally randomness disguised and perceived as non randomness that is determinism. It manifests itself in the shape of the lucky fool defined as the person who benefits from a disproportionate share of luck but attributes his success to some other generally very precise reason. Such confusion crops up in the most unexpected areas even science though not in such an accentuated and obvious manner as it does in the world of business. It is endemic in politics and it can be encountered in the shape of a country's president discoursing on the jobs that he created and his recovery and his predecessors inflation. Okay, I'm going to stop here but it's actually a very fun read because the author is also very sarcastic in a stone and it was just like the first book of this kind that I've read where someone is it just sounds like he's really speaking his mind without sugarcoating anything without worrying about offending anyone else like he calls out a few people by name in his book it's a really really fun read and I actually listen to the audiobook and it's I think it has to be like the best audiobook I've listened to so far just because like the tone of the book is really good it's really fun and the narrator who read it actually was really able to bring it to life and he brought like all of the snark and the sarcastic tone to life so it's like I actually laughed out loud at a few places in the book which rarely happens I think you might enjoy it Jake just because yeah like books that are well written and I'm not an expert but I think this book is really enjoyable this sounds great yeah this sounds exactly like the kind of thing it's interesting to find the books that are like really really great and this is actually I mean we talked about lightning demos a second ago lightning demos the step and the design sprint where you look at what are places where people have solved an analogous problem in a different domain different industry and sometimes if we look where there's like a lot of competition or somebody's done something amazing we can be inspired and take that idea back to what we're trying to do in our product challenge and this is totally apply that same idea to books like looking for the amazing book the really well written super smart book that's in a totally different domain or even is maybe more generalized and then trying to find the way to apply it and find a concrete way to apply it to what you're doing I believe is super powerful however I might be generalizing off of what was just one lucky success with the design sprint so we have to be careful because that's that's a risk yeah by the way like anyone who's read the book can vouch for this but the sprint book is a really easy read every time I give it to someone I just tell them that this doesn't read like a business book it actually reads just like a it's a super easy read you can probably finish it in a few hours in one day or a couple of days but it doesn't at all read like a business book like a David Allen book of getting things done it's way way way better oh well that's very kind of you to say bye sprint everybody bye sprint the more copies you buy the more innovative you'll be so I hope you enjoyed Jake and Amar discussing the four product books you haven't read like I said let us know in the comments if you have read them if you haven't read them or what books we should be checking out as product designers thanks so much for watching you can check out the product breakfast club every Monday morning and any podcast app have a great one