recommends / book
“Okay. Not to be cliched, but The Hard Thing about Hard Things I still think is the best book written about product management, just from a breadth of things that you have to go through and try and do and screw up a lot. Slightly left field, but the best book anyone's ever recommended to me to read, which I now recommend to others, is The Purpose Driven Church by a pastor called Rick Warren. Emmett Shear, the CEO at Twitch, used to basically make sure that people read it. It's this wild examination of why people emotionally invest in something and how to engineer emotional investment into it from a group of people. It's literally a how to go and build a church guidebook written in the '90s. Definitely worth a read if you're in a community product of any form. And the last one is if you're looking for fiction or fantasy, which is where I tend to go in the evening, Babel by R.F. Kuang.”
Tom Verrilli · Lenny's Podcast · This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) · 2 Aug 2026
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recommends / book
“Maybe a boring answer, but these are the books I believe in. I recommended the Steve Jobs book by Walter Isaacson. I have recommended Elon Musk book. I have read the Ashlee Vance one fully. I'm in the middle of the Walter Isaacson one and I have recommended Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. These are the three books. I think that there was a period of time in Silicon Valley maybe 10 years ago, and maybe this is still true, but everyone wanted to be Steve Jobs and they thought that they can just recreate being Steve Jobs. There was this fever in the valley, and the reason why you want to listen or read that book is you need to understand the context of what makes up the entire person. Yes, the person part is important, but how they apply their own context to the products that they ship and they change the world is important because not that I or anyone else can recreate what they did or what they're doing, but take the learnings from them and see how you can apply the same principles to your context. You're not going to behave the same way that they did. You're not going to build products the same way that they did, but you're going to give it your absolute freaking best because that's what your end users deserve and you're not going to compromise on that. That's sort of what my takeaway is, and I think that takeaway is extremely strong in the books that I talk about. And the Ben Horowitz book, it goes back to my concept of resilience. Some people have this really optimistic view of how life is in the corporate world or in the product world or in the CEO office. It's not so. These are lonely jobs, these are hard things, and how do you persist through that? I felt that that book was amazing at teaching me that.”
Sachin Kansal · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · 1 Jun 2025
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recommends / book
“The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. Actually read it quite some time ago, but I found myself recommending it to other product managers most often. It's actually illustrative that to be a great product manager, someone needs to strive to being a great CEO. And besides this book emphasizes the importance of building systematic solutions and scalable solutions, which is critical for scaling a company. Also being honest on how important it is to grind stuff. And then second book is, I read it more recently, Build by Tony Fadell. I was really inspired by this one, especially given how I appreciate how it's not easy to build hardware and what Tony was describing there is just super exciting and inspiring. And also I think that there are different archetypes of product managers. There are people who tend to disrupt things more. Personally I think about myself as a builder, so Tony's principles that he highlighted in the book that they resonate with me a lot.”
Dmitry Zlokazov · Lenny's Podcast · How Revolut trains world-class product managers: The “local CEO” model, raw intellect over experience, and a cultural obsession with building wow products | Dmitry Zlokazov (Head of Product) · 15 May 2025
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recommends / book
“The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, such a great book, great again about mindset of how to approach hard things. Second is I'm a huge fantasy sci-fi fan, so I love Brandon Sanderson's books. I highly recommend those to people as well.”
Anneka Gupta · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, harnessing founder mode, and more | Anneka Gupta (Chief Product Officer at Rubrik) · 17 Oct 2024
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uses / book
“" And then I read another book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz was like, "Oh my God, there are even more answers.”
Matt Mochary · Lenny's Podcast · How to fire people with grace, work through fear, and nurture innovation | Matt Mochary (CEO coach) · 10 Nov 2022
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