Required Summer Reading for startups - product development

No one usually likes to rave about their best kept secrets - in this case essential reading material for any entreprenuer, startup or marketing manager. These two books should urgently be added to your bookshelf.

If you’re about to head off for some sun - do pack these 2 books so you can say you seriously did some ‘work’.

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Why Do I need to know these books?

You need to know about current tools and the best practices as they are already appearing in many business plans, marketing strategy or new product definitions.

If you evaluate startups and are not getting a business model canvas then you should tell them to go re-write their business pan.

If you’re a marketing product manager or insights person and you can’t use a business model canvas, then get in contact. I’m offering a 1 hour introduction to business model canvas.

Essential Reading List for entrepreneurs, startups and product managers

Four steps to the epiphany

Never discredit anyone who wants to teach entrepreneurship, Steven Blank is a professor and his book 4 Steps to the Epiphany is the new textbook. As The Aprentice and MBA schools around the world try to show, entreprenuership can be taught. It’s often though that the winner was already a natural born killer. Steve’s current view is that using business model generation tools and what he teaches will make a better class of tommorrow.

This book focuses on the first dotcom bubble and espouses a good model of bulding business based on a customer insights and engagement. This is radical thinking for any traditional marketing product manager.

(ships only via Amazon US - you can’t buy this from Amazon UK)

Business model generation

So Business Model Generation (via Amazon UK) is a Box of Delights  – helping to analyse and visually communicate new products, change management and organisation design. The basis of the book is what is referred to as the business model canvas. It’s A3 thinking that can be shrunk down to an A4 paper and more akin to a Japanese bento box.

The book has been kicking around for 18 months and many business plans are now including this. If you’re not using a canvas in your elevator pitch - its likely that you’ll be ignored as no other tool can present your business in 1 page.

Meet the author

Damien Saunders
An experienced management consultant and business leader interested in digital transformation, product centred design and scaled agile. If I'm not writing about living with UCTD (an autoimmune disease), I'm probably listening to music, reading a book or learning more about wine.