(In no particular order, no affiliates)
⁉️ Feature Factory - No clear Product Goals
A dark pattern I often encounter is the "Feature Factory". Without clear incentives the Producr Owner is just a master of lists where features are guessed while something gets shipped to the users. High recommended read especially in larger organisations:
Signs you're working in a Feature Factory
👨🏫 Challenger Sales Approach
The best way to sell something, is to teach your potential customer and provide valuable knowledge upfront. The following tailoring and discussions leads to a reliable sale. Good lecture on how to understand customers and providing a modern sales experience
Challenger Sales Book on Amazon
🌠 Northstar - One Metric for Product Success
Having a single metric for your product success sounds easy but is hard when well done. Take the time and define your northstar based on value your product (software) provides to your customers. Decisions are made easier together with supporting key metrics.
Discover your Product North Star
🏎 Real world experience on B2B Software Sales
A manual for selling digital products would most likely look like this. The authors describe how to find and setup a solid B2B sales process with many experiences from startups. Highly recommended not only for Startups - as many other industries are now starting to sell software and data services (e.g. Industry 4.0).
Fast Forward: B2B-Sales on Amazon
🔥 Structure for Business Plans
Whether you want to structure an idea in your mind or are about to create a world-changing pitchdeck, Sequioa Capitals structure makes for a good start.
Writing a Business Plan, Sequioa Capital
💪 How to transform the industry - digital and for real.
(German) Philipp successfully transformed tradtional german industrial organisations into digital leaders. By having an agile mindset, iterative approach and separating those internal new ideas from the rest of the organisation. Absolute must-read with many examples.
👣 How to grow - with a more traditional mindset
(German) This book provides hard questions and tasks on how to reduce the role of the founder. While the approach itself is more classic than most startups would prefer, I found it really helpful for my self-reflection on how to run and take care of a business for the long-term.
"Erfolgreicher Unternehmer" on Amazon
🔷 Blueprint for a Sales Process
A great ressource on how to define stages for a software sales process. While other books mentioned here are collection of experiences, this one is a straight-forward defined process including the right questions.
Entrepid How to Sell Guide PDF Download
Bonus: Managing Expectations in Pilots
🪨 Say it right, every time
Expressing your ideas and saying things you want is hard. I still see room for improvements for myself. The "Pitch Perfect" guidance by Bill McGowan contains many Dos and Donts.
How to say it right, the first time, every time on Amazon
📈 Exponential growth affects us all
(German) Eye-opening metrics about how small improvements can lead to exponential growth that we as a species often under-estimate. From electrical cars, social media, climate change to the Covid-19 pandemic: Our world is changing (too) fast and we need to adapt.