No matter what your age, the process of learning never ends. We, as humans, are always looking to enhance our skills in our specific fields. When it comes to books, we have compiled a list of the best ones that can help guide you in developing your skills.
As we have entered the new decade, all of us want to make good use of this opportunity in order to enhance our careers. Therefore, we have gathered all the best books that were written in this past decade when it comes to the startup world. Whether its building products, management, content writing, or design; we have a book or two for you!
These books have been written by talented individuals, whose guidance is going to help you go a long way. They are filled with knowledge that you can implement not only in your careers but also in your life. You will view your users and your products from a different perspective after reading these books. When reading these books, you will realize that you aren’t the only one who feels about your work a certain way, and other individuals are in similar boats.
Take this moment to fully immerse yourself inside any of these topics, which attracts your attention and take lessons from individuals who have truly altered the way we think about strategy, how we write, design, and startups.
You must be wondering who this list of books is directed towards. Well, these books are for entrepreneurs, managers, marketers, designers, writers, product developers, freelancers, CEOs, executives, and the ones who are looking for personal growth plus innovation.
How Can These Books Help?
If you are someone who is working on a tech product or close to one, then you are going to find this list very helpful. The list below showcases around twenty-five books; however do not get intimidated by that number. It should be noted that these books aren’t suppose to teach you each and every skill about becoming a one-person startup. These books are there to help you in understanding how all of these fields work and how they’re somehow connected to each other. Through these books, you will also learn how you can understand the challenges and the language of each field that is involved in making a product. Armed with the knowledge from these books, you will have the confidence you need in order to have a productive conversation with the professional people you work with, have to report to, or lead while creating a product.
Furthermore, the more you educate yourself about the unfamiliar subjects, the more you are going to be aware regarding the challenges faced by other people in the related fields. Hopefully, with this additional knowledge, you will be able to create more successful and more sustainable products that are loved by the people who use them.
In this article, we cover everything from product building to positioning and growth. Plus, you will also understand the design process, enhance your writing, get lessons in real-life startup, and learn how to successfully work with people.
Great Books For Product Building
Any business owner can pen their thoughts about their business experiences. However, only a couple of selected books have made it into this list. These books are known to have truly altered the way we plan and then make the products. A few of them have presented new approaches, while others provide certain guidelines that have led to success. The authors from all of these books went on to become household names in this industry. Often times, they have drawn people to their conferences or have started a conversation on Twitter that was trending. If you haven’t read these books yet, then there’s no better time than the present!
- ‘Hacking Growth’ by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown
This book is for founders and the members of the growth team and the marketing team. The best time to read this book is when you are having difficulties with growth or when your MVP is still in development.
Society sees changes every other day as time goes on, hence businesses need to change as well in order to remain relevant in the market. There aren’t any shortcuts for growth to take place. People often say to ‘keep hustling’, however, this isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. Wasting your resources and people isn’t the right method for growth.
On the other hand, there are other methods out there that guarantee healthy growth. Once you are aware of your efforts, then you can use that to incorporate that effort in a direction that will give you the most ideal results. This is what this book will help you do. This book is not only for marketers or the people who are working in product innovation, but it’s also for all of the managers and designers who can affect the growth. Individuals who are searching for superior ways to adapt, see a growth in their company, and improve their customer base; this book will be extremely helpful for them.
The writers wanted to write this book because they saw great potential for growth when it comes to all kinds of businesses. They believed that it was essential for people to understand the process and have a guide that contains the best practices with ways on how you can implement them. When it comes to market development, growth hacking is essentially a new approach that contains a lot of power. However, how one can use that to gain maximum benefit is still not understood well enough.
- ‘The Lean Startup’ by Eric Ries
This book is for founders or anyone who is working in a startup. The best time to read this book is when you have a product idea but are confused about how and where to start.
When it comes to trying to understand startups, this book is a classic. It was the best seller on Amazon for Lean Management. This was the first book that introduced the whole concept of lean management. It explained the products’ iterative development when it comes to lowering risks throughout the development cycles. To this day, everyone is following this method. Also, this book started the whole concept of MVPs, hence that’s why people have transferred from huge market research projects to a much smaller and pointed experiments that confirm or doesn’t confirm a hypothesis.
In order to understand the failure of previous startups and learn from their mistakes, you need to read this book.
- ‘Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers’ by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
This book is for individuals who are looking to turn their idea into a successful business. The best time to read this book is before you start development or operations, and when you are still figuring out resourcing.
This book is co-written by almost 500 strategy practitioners, who utilized the ‘business model canvas.’ This book is known as the business planning template that is supposed to guide you when it comes to understanding the ideas you have and the development of your future startup.
Thanks to the exercises in this book, you become a lot more knowledgeable regarding your customers, the required infrastructure, and all of the financial possibilities. This book helps greatly in understanding a business’s moving parts, including the ones you probably aren’t aware of, plus how you can keep track of all of them.
This guide is for individuals who want to take action and use a structured approach towards a business strategy.
- ‘The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company’ by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf
This book is for people who are venturing into the startup world and want an overview. The best time to read this book is when you start calling yourself an entrepreneur.
This book is yet another great one when it comes to understanding how you can build your startup and also develop your product. You are given instructions for having a successful experience as an entrepreneur. So if you are looking to launch your startup on a digital platform or in the real world, you have all of the necessary steps that you need in order to start, presented to you in this book.
There is no book out there, even this one, that provides all of the answers or a complete roadmap for the entrepreneurs. However, when studied together, the writing that’s present within the entrepreneurial management science library can provide guidance to the entrepreneurs, when there was none before. The startups that have been powered by potential markets were measured in more than a million of people, and they will use this knowledge in order to test, then refine, and scale all of their ideas much quicker and in a more affordable manner.
- 5. ‘The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback’ by Dan Olsen
This book is for individuals whose teams have begun development or want to improve their product. Founders, designers, marketers, and product managers will find this book useful. This book can be read once you have introduced your MVP and have a bit of usage data.
Since the lean startup principles started gaining popularity, there was also a need to have a detailed guide on how you can use them. The author showcased the lean product process’s main concepts and provided the techniques that were from real-life experiences when it came to building and optimizing the product. Questions, like what will better fit the market or how can you target your customers’ needs and what are they, are some of the questions that have been answered and explained in this book.
Besides the Lean Product Process, this book covers a variety of other important topics. This book also explains in details the Agile development and UX design. Moreover, there is also a thorough coverage of analytics and how you can use metrics in order to optimize your product.
- 6. ‘Ruined by design’ by Mike Monteiro
This book is for designers or anyone else who is responsible for making decisions that directly affect the product. The book can be read at any time you want, particularly when you want to build your products with intent.
This book made the bestseller list on Amazon and was awarded ‘Book of the Year’ by the UX Collective in 2019. This book challenges all the designers or anyone else who’s working on products and wants them to be aware of all of the product decisions that they are making. The author mentions that today’s products greatly affect each aspect of society and this is the time to leave the safe space where the employees have to live through the consequences that come from the decisions made by the designers. When designers do not know how to say ‘no’ or ask ‘why’, then the products they create can’t really fulfill all of the needs of their users or even protect them.
So, whether you see this as an introspection or a call to arms into the type of world we are building, this book is going to guide you on being more aware regarding all of the product choices that you make.
The aim of this book is to help the reader do the right thing in an environment that is designed to make the wrong thing look much easier. Either through fault or ignorance, action or inaction, the world has been designed in accordance to what it is behaving like right now.
Great Books For Positioning And Growth
Do you still consider yourself a founder if you created a product that isn’t used by anybody? There are several founding teams that take stress when it comes to the development and production of their product, while paying little attention or using a small budget when it comes to their market strategy. For new startups, their end goal is often the creation of their product, however the end goal is actually making people purchase their product and use it.
This is when positioning and growth should be taken into consideration. Being aware of your audience, their needs, where you can reach them, and how you can scale the customer acquisition channels is crucial when it comes to creating a sustainable business.
Therefore, the next collection of books is meant to guide you on getting started. Through these books, you are able to learn from others’ experiences, including how you can smartly make use of positioning and growth.
- 1. ‘Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth’ by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
This book is for managers, founders, and marketers who want to gain traction. The best time to read this book is when you are just about to start planning for your market strategy. You can also go back to this book when the current growth plans of your business aren’t working.
This book is filled with practically used advice that is based on actual businesses. Every new startup needs traction, which is the element that accelerates the growth of a company and takes it in the right direction. In order to get traction, the authors of this book presented the Bullseye framework which explains how one can recognize and approach the growth channels. The outside layer is all about understanding the possible channels that are for user acquisition. This usually happens during the brainstorming phase. The layer after that is known as the testing phase, where you select three channels with the greatest potential for the current resourcing and then positioning. Plus, also make a plan for all of their specific traits. The bullseye is the last layer, where you continue investing in channels that produced results until they stopped performing, as you add newer channels that can quicken your traction.
- 2. ‘Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models’ by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
This book is for individuals who are just starting their careers or want to make improved decisions. This book can be read at any time. Whenever you have to make a new decision, you can come back to this book or study the examples given in it.
A founder who has the ability of assessing any type of situation and making the right decision on what to do next possesses a unique skill. Doing that becomes easier when one has the talent of working with mental models, which are defined ways when it comes to observing the world and also data. The authors of this book added their own uniqueness to the book and at the same time explained how you can basically upgrade your mind. This book contains fun illustrations and great graphs that hold the attention of the reader. It stands out when compared with other books that tackle these similar themes. Plus, even though you are just getting the introductory concepts that were the result of decade long researches in psychology, sociology, and economics, this book is still a great place to start when it comes to going down the research rabbit hole.
People who have read the book wished that they received this knowledge years ago. Doesn’t matter where you’re in your life, this book is written and designed to help a person jump-start their thinking journey.
- 3. ‘Obviously Awesome’ by April Dunford
This book is for founders, managers, executives, and marketers. The best time to read this book is when you are still figuring out how to position yourself when compared with the competitors and how you can identify your target audience.
If you want your business to stay unique in a crowded market, then you should position it correctly. When you achieve a correct position, everything seems to run a lot more smoothly and doesn’t take a lot of effort and time as before.
The author of this book brought years of experience plus useful tips when it comes to positioning and made it into a detailed guide. The customers of your business will understand your product after observing two different frameworks, one of them being ‘market categories’ and the second one being ‘trends.’ In order to become a well-positioned business and product, you need to put your solution in a market that greatly highlights your key features that makes your business different, and make people understand why all that is relevant at the moment. This book is the one for you if you are looking to study the art of positioning that has been turned into a strategy with actionable insights, which can be followed in order to achieve them.
- 4. ‘Badass: Making Users Awesome’ by Kathy Sierra
This book is for founders, designers, product people, and marketers. The best time to read this book is when you are planning your ultimate market strategy, including your users’ onboarding plus activation.
When you work on a product for a long time, it seems easier to allow it to occupy all the headspace and measure success depending on how well that product is performing. The author reminds us in this book that what actually matters is the users’ success.
This book is not only interactive, it is also funny. When it comes to product design and development, the author presented a strategy that will help create successful users and not just products and services that are successful. Hence, you have to consider all of the environment’s elements in which the product is going to be placed. Moreover, you also need to pay attention to each of the steps that are required when it comes to understanding your users’ context. This book isn’t the standard marketing or business book, yet you will find an abundance of knowledge taken from a variety of disciplines.
Great Books For Grasping The Design Process
Since the last ten years, designers have been working relentlessly and have changed people’ perception about them. Today they are known as important stakeholders that advocate for the user and focuses on how a product works. The books mentioned in this section will teach the readers how to comprehend the design process, what is beneath an interface design decision, how you can design for everyone, and also how you can negotiate plus relate with the clients.
- 1. ‘Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days’ by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Brad Kowitz
This book is for founders, designers, people who are managing teams, and marketers. The best time to read this book is when you want to learn how quickly hypotheses can be validated for newer features, newer product, or newer audiences.
The best ideas come at the most unlikely places, whether it’s during a shower, in a coffee shop, or when waiting in a line. This is exactly what Jake Knapp noticed when he conducted brainstorming sessions during his workshops. Hence, the concept of design sprint was created. If you’re someone who enjoyed the use of lean methodology, then you most probably will also like working in sprints. No time is wasted in unnecessary meetings and ideas are stripped down to their simplest versions that are able to generate insights. Moreover, sprints are also great when it comes to staging informal interdisciplinary team buildings, since a tight deadline is known to bring people together to complete their work. There is step-by-step advice in this book on how you can organize a sprint, create deadlines, and also test ideas.
- 2. ‘Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places’ by Jorge Arango
This book is for designers or anyone else who is responsible for making the decisions that affect their product. This book can be read at any time, particularly when you want to know the type of user data you will need or what you can do with it.
The world is getting more and more digitalized as we speak. The way we shop, work, or even talk to others depends on the digital products that we are building. That is why the author presented the idea of ‘information environments’ and suggested connecting them to the physical environments. All of the people and designers that are involved in creating digital products and want to create a software that’s sustainable economically, socially, and ecologically can greatly benefit from this book.
If you’re part of a digital product or service, or a member of the team that’s responsible for one, you are going to greatly benefit from understanding how you can design a much more sustainable information environment. Even if you are not a part of such system, you are still going to benefit from this book. Majority of your important decisions take place on a small rectangular screen. Therefore, it is only fitting that you understand how exactly does information environments affect your behavior.
- 3. ‘Accessibility for Everyone’ by Laura Kalbag
This book is for founders, marketers, designers, and anyone who is responsible for making decisions that will affect their product. The best time to read this book is when you realize that your product is being used by individuals with disabilities, whether it’s permanent or temporary.
About 2.2 billion people in the world have vision impairment or are blind, according to the World Health Organization. Additionally, at least 466 million individuals are suffering from a disabling hearing loss. Hence, a lot of these people find it difficult to read a webpage’s content or cannot read it at all. As a response to this, the EU launched the Web Accessibility Directive. According to this, all websites and mobile apps that are from the public sectors need to make their content easily accessible to people who have disabilities. However, there is a lot more to this. Everyone can benefit when it comes to content accessibility and of course this will also result in the business getting better.
In order to make your design accessible to each person, there is a lot of team effort involved, whether its content writers, designers, or front-end developers. The author suggests that you make accessibility the main focus of the design practice. For instance, you can make your font bigger so it’s easier to read, be aware of the color contrast that you use, explain the images in an alt field so it is easier to pick them up by screen readers.
- 4. ‘Just Enough Research’ by Erika Hall (2nd Edition)
This book is for designers, managers, and entrepreneurs. The best time to read this book is before you start a new project, before you allocate your budget (if you’re a decision-maker), or if you are the one requesting for a budget for your research.
At often times, research is viewed as a waste of resources and money. This can happen due to many reasons, such as a tight budget, an executive team who can’t use the new insights, or maybe they are biased when it comes to understanding the industry. Either way, this can lead to misalignments and errors in the design that will waste both time and money. Also, it will cost a lot more to fix a product as compared to the cost of the initial research. You might forget this step or think that it can be done later, especially if you’re in a rush to launch the product. However, the author mentions that research is the ultimate step that can either make or break your startup. If you want your product to be successful then you should focus on the needs of its users, hence finding out those needs requires a little bit of research.
Research is the ultimate tool that provides you with a better view of the surroundings. When applied thoughtfully, it has the potential of being very powerful. Therefore, instead of piling on the costs, both you and your team will save a lot of time and effort by just doing some research beforehand.
Great Books For Better And Enhanced Writing
A design is incomplete when there are no words that explain what it is about. A website that doesn’t contain well-formulated content cannot be taken seriously. Writing content that is easy to grasp, is useful, and makes a high impact is a skill that everyone can learn. If you are someone who’s having trouble in shortening your writing, making it more clear, making it more instructional, or making it more persuasive, then these books below are sure to help you out.
- 1. ‘The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century’ by Steven Pinker
This book is for people who want to improve their writing skills. The best time to read this book is when you are staring at a blank page and don’t know what to write.
This book is a guide for the ones who want to improve how they write and it offers a comprehensive explanation when it comes to the nature of the language and how it’s processed inside people’s mind. Besides being one of the leading authors of the world on mind and language, Steven Pinker is also a psycholinguist and a cognitive scientist. He mentions points that are thorough and comprehensive, using humor and funny illustrations with examples and quotes from his real life. People with no linguistic background can easily read this book as well. Even though this book doesn’t answer all of the questions, but by the end of it you will know how to send across your message with a little bit of flair.
- 2. ‘The Elements of Content Strategy’ by Erin Kissane
This book is for designers, product people, technical writers, content strategist, and marketers, who are contributing with content for product or marketing purposes. The best time to read this book is during the early stages. However, this book may be light for the ones who have been in this field for more than 2 years.
It can be difficult to write content that’s meaningful, especially when you’re at the start of your career. The difficulty increases when you start work on a big website that has multiple pages, or a big product with an in-app copy, plus a knowledge base, and a lot more resources. You probably need the help of a content strategist if the content in your startup isn’t owned by anyone and no one can understand how it is structured. Or, you need to understand all of the principles behind it and then create structure plus intent. The author offers an introduction inside this complex topic, including the basic principles and the tools and techniques needed in order to get started. There is also a list of resources for additional advanced insights.
This book isn’t a workbook or a tutorial that will tell you how to start earning millions in just ten easy steps. However, it collects the core principles of our discipline, capabilities, and practices for an easy reference into content work.
- 3. ‘Content Design’ by Sarah Richards
This book is for founders, designers, product people, marketers, and writers that have worked with a large amount of information and presented it in a simple and digestible way. The best time to read this book is during the early stages of your career. Plus, if you have experience in UX design then some parts of the book might be familiar to you.
The author created content design in the form of a discipline through the work she did at the Government Digital Services. With her team, she took a straightforward and honest approach and placed the most important needs of the users as the main focus of her research. Their goal was to come up with the exact way to show users the information that they need, whenever they need it. This is a short but concise book. The book gives you insights on content design, including tips on how you can use it in your company. The author was also included during the making of the Readability Guidelines project, which was a movement whose goal was to provide the instructions that were needed in order to create content that’s more inclusive and comprehensible. She shows what she preaches on the pages of her book, making its layout eye-catching and unique.
- 4. ‘Writing for Designers’ by Scott Kubie
This book is for managers, designers, and founders, who become part of the occasional writing project. This book is also useful for content designers and marketers that want more structure in the work that they do. The right time to read this book is before you start a major writing project. Plus, also when you want to align a team on how they can work on content plus review writing.
Everyone has their specific process when it comes to writing, but it is difficult for them to explain that process. The author believes that writing is an essential portion of design. But, creating the correct workflow isn’t always easy. However, you can make this process simple by going through the four step workflow that the author mentions in his book. This short workbook guides the reader throughout all these steps when it comes to improving one’s writing skills.
Great Books That Contain Real-life Startup Lessons
There are people who have created empires from a small startup and a couple of them continue to stand. You might be thinking about how they reached that level. However, there are also the ones that have miserably failed and it is better to learn from their mistakes so you don’t make them as well. The books mentioned in this section offers a closer look in the decisions that took place behind-the-scenes that could make or break a company.
- 1. ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers’ by Ben Horowitz
This book is for founders, CEOs, and people who want to build a business. The best time to read this book is during the early days of leading your team or when you have to make major decisions for your company.
A decade ago, Ben Horowitz, along with Marc Andressen, co-founded a venture capital firm, which works by investing in growth companies and startups. Today, this firm has made investments in Twitter, Skype, Airbnb, and Facebook, to name a few, making it one of the most influential venture capital firms that’s currently shaping the world.
His book can be viewed as a memoir or an advice book for your business. Either way, this book mentions all of the hard times the author went through in his business and all the decisions that he made. This book is for executives and CEOs that’s written by another CEO.
This book does not present any formula, and only contains the story and difficulties that the author had to face. The lessons in this book are going to be useful for future founders and CEOs. The author mentions that there are difficulties when it comes to building a company and he has been there. The circumstances might be different but the patterns and lessons keep resonating.
- 2. ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products’ by Nir Eyal
This book is for designers, founders, marketers, or anyone who’s working on customer success. The best time to read this book is before you launch your MVP or before you look to improve your current product.
Why do users keep coming back to the same products again and again? What is the psychology behind it all? This book offers advice that’s based on substantial research when it comes to building products that will attract the customers. This ‘hook model’ isn’t created to be used in order to manipulate or trick individuals into using products. However, when it’s used with mindfulness and responsibility, it can offer insights into our habits and triggers. A world where every service provider is competing for the attention, money, and time of a user, this book helps in teaching the readers what they need in order to make a successful product that not only delivers value, but also dominates the market.
- 3. ‘Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup’ by John Carreyrou
This book is for anyone who is part of the startup industry or wants to know more about venture capital. This book can be read at any time.
The Theranos scandal became the biggest corporate fraud of the last couple of years. The idea that you can conduct blood tests by using just a tiny fraction of blood soon became a revolutionary idea. This idea was introduced by Elizabeth Holmes, who was an intelligent young woman that wanted to outdo Steve Jobs in whatever that she did. The media was also eagerly waiting to see the rise of a brilliant new mind. Hence, some high profile people invested in this project, such as Betsy DeVos, the United States’ education secretary and the Walton family. However, these people lost millions when Theranos could not do what it promised to and went bankrupt in the year 2018.
The author of this book mentions how he discovered this scam and how the CEO of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, fooled the whole world. This fraud is a lesson on the power of deception and dangers of celebrity.
Elizabeth Holmes did genuinely believe in her vision and threw herself into her work. However, in her quest to becoming the next Steve Jobs, she stopped following sound advice and started cutting corners. She had a greedy ambition that didn’t allow anyone else’s interference. She did not care if there was possibility of collateral damage on her way to success and riches.
- 4. ‘Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works (Lean Series)’ by Ash Maurya (2nd Edition)
This book is for founders, managers, executives, product people, and marketers. The best time to read this book is during a startup’s beginning stages, when searching for a product-market fit.
When it comes to product-market fit and the symptoms of not doing it correctly, these are a couple of the reasons why a startup would fail. Hence, this book is another great one when it comes to lean methodology that teaches you on how you can turn your ideas into actions. Whether it’s finding a problem that you can solve to looking for the ideal market for your product, this book takes you through all of the important steps so you increase your chances of success.
A lot of the entrepreneurs begin their journey with their initial vision plus Plan A in order to execute that vision. However, a lot of those Plan A’s do not work. Even though a strong vision is needed in order to go on, this book strives to support that vision with facts, and not just faith. One should accept the fact that their initial vision is created mostly on untested assumptions, also known as hypotheses. Hence, this book is going to help you thoroughly test and then refine the initial vision that you had.
Great Books For Learning How You Can Work With People
This skill has to be the most important one among all of the skills that this list covered. You are required to talk to individuals on a daily basis if you want to get things done, whether you are a CEO, manager, designer, writer, or developer. When you communicate well with others, you create a healthy workplace culture. The books listed in this section are going to help you achieve all that.
- 1. ‘Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity’ by Kim Scott
This book is for founders, executives, or anyone who’s managing a team. This book can be read at any time, particularly when you are about to start working with a new team.
In this book, the author teaches its readers how they can become better leaders and managers. The author mentions that a place where human relationships are appreciated and the people feel safe when it comes to sharing their feedback, that is when creativity and innovation flourishes in an environment. The book also has tips on how you shouldn’t create toxic culture at the workplace, whether you’re too nice to offer honest feedback or are too aggressive without being aware of the other person’s mood. A truly honest conversation can take place by openly sharing your concerns with your colleagues and handling stress and difficulties in a balanced manner.
- 2. ‘You’re My Favorite Client’ by Mike Monteiro
This book is for freelancers, people who work with freelancers, and people who own small businesses. The best time to read this book is during the early stages of your career and before you get your first-ever clients. This book is also very useful later on, particularly when you’re in need of a pep talk.
This book is the follow-up to another book by the same author called ‘Design is a Job.’ Whether you’re a freelancer who is starting their career in the field of design, or you work with designers every day and are looking to create an environment where creativity can thrive, then this book is for you. With his upfront writing that adds humor, the author explains in this book how an individual can negotiate their contracts and their payments. He also mentions how you can handle your relationships with your clients, particularly during unforeseen events.
If this is the first time where you’re working with a designer, then this book is going to clarify the hiring process, explain what you can expect from them, and how you can work together in order to achieve success in your project. Plus, the book also mentions how you can handle a situation that goes badly. However, if you have worked with a designer before, then this book also explains how you can communicate much more effectively with them, why giving them lists of what they should do will only halt their best work, and why you shouldn’t hover over their shoulder at all times. Furthermore, you will discover why it’s important to include designers in strategy meetings. You will discover that designing starts way before a line is drawn or a pixel is pushed. Through his writing, the author helps all of the designers who give his book a read.
- 3. ‘The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work’ by Scott Berkun
This book is for managers, team leaders, and people who want to know the workings of a remote organization. The best time to read this book is prior to working within a remote team.
According to studies, when choosing a job, about 79% of millennials want flexibility in their workplace and it is a top priority for them. Since millennials became an essential and important factor of the workforce, it is imperative that the future of the workplace should be taken into consideration. The author of this book challenges certain long-held assumptions when it comes to working remotely, the schedules, communication plus experimentation.
However, all of the work is invisible and it’s hidden inside their laptop screens. What people aren’t aware of is that by just clicking a button from any of the web browsers, certain features can be launched that would affect millions of people from all over the world, instantly. But for others, it probably looks like they are just playing solitaire on their laptops.