Likes How to Measure Anything.

Transcript context

…What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? Yeah, this one's pretty easy because they are fairly similar lately. So I really like the book How to Measure Anything, finding Intangibles or Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business. So that's by Douglas Hubbard. And the reason why I like that is again, at Amplitude the number of people who would come in like, "What are all our competitors measuring? We want to know exactly which metric to measure." And again, I'm laughing with you because I know you have these posts. Here's exactly the metrics that you should track. I really respect those posts and that's the power that you have. That's all really good. But what Hubbard reminds you is why the hell are you measuring things to begin with? It's to reduce uncertainty for critical decisions or to achieve certain objectives that you have. The reason why it's important to read that book is A, you figure out someone who's again, actionable, has thought this through. So he gives you kind of a framework to thinking about it. But B, he really challenges this idea of when making decisions in conditions of uncertainty, you only need to reduce the uncertainty to an acceptable amount to be able to make the next decision that you need to make. And we never have, people are like, "Product is science." It's really an art, like a game that's being played out. You never have complete information to do it. So I think that's a good book to remind people about what... To be more creative and thinking about measurement instead of thinking about measurement and metrics is just about adopting the exact metrics that everyone has and doing that. The second one I think would probably be Accelerate. So Nicole Forsgren, Gene Kim, Jez Humble, that's just one of the best books in the world about the factors contributing to performance. And it's built on many... It's six, I don't know, it's been out for a while now, 10 years? They did the Dora report, which was their yearly report where they did big surveys, like 10, 20, 30, 40,000 people responding to it. And Nicole Forsgren is an amazing scientist. So they structure their thing correctly. They would have a hypothesis about what is equal to performance and how all these individual practices contribute to it. And then they've updated it over time. And I think that Google bought Dora, I don't know exactly how all the parts came into place, but that book is amazing, just sort of teaching you how to think about the idea of performance because they'll include things like the Western topology, which is your company operating a bureaucracy or... These certain culture elements to it, but then also the practices and things that you're doing. So that's a great book when you're trying to think about, "How do I model performance?" And then it's also an amazing book because you can just literally put the stuff into motion about improving your development practices and things you're doing. ink about, "How do I model performance?" And then it's also an amazing book because you can just literally put the stuff into motion about improving your development practices and things you're doing. And then I think probably the last one, man, I just love this book, this Jeff Patton book about user story mapping. I love what Jeff Patton did. He took this extremely simple idea, which is that you can lay out a customer journey and then organize, take a slice across that journey and develop it. And he gives this pretty basic straightforward method to do it. But I tell you, I'll go into companies like a year after they had Jeff in and learned this and they're still like buzzing about, "Hey, user story map." And it's just, he's a super humble guy and he would never outstate the value of this. He'd be like, "Yeah, it's just a journey map with a couple sticky notes on it." But I always, when someone's new at product management, I'm like, "Hey, this is a deceptively simple book. You'll learn this very basic idea, but it'll teach you a lot about product when I do that." So those are three that come to mind.…

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