Evan's Notes: Best of 2022
End-of-year recap of the summaries I've shared during my first 3 months, with some personal notes on how they've shaped my life and my work.
It was only a few months ago (early October) when I started publicly sharing my detailed book notes through Substack. I’ve been blown away: in less than 3 months I’ve shared 11 full summaries and more than 2,000 curious people have subscribed. Thank you for the encouragement and positive feedback.
There are many different reasons why I enjoy hand-crafting these comprehensive book summaries. I find I am able to really see the world through the author’s point of view (and not in a superficial way), which reframes my own lived experience. Capturing complex ideas in a concise way also helps me hone my own writing. I get to practice reinforcement learning and spaced repetition (with a minimum of 3 passes through the content of each book), which helps me remember the material with fluency. I almost always get some set of tactics or ideas to apply directly to my day-to-day work as a product leader at Fin, where we are building a data platform to help teams execute more effectively. And I often discover fascinating connections with other things I’ve read along the way.
Summarizing a book is equally invaluable when I later facilitate a discussion on the material. I do this regularly within the Slack community for paid subscribers to Lenny’s Newsletter (if you’re a subscriber, come join us in #book-club). Each summary is something tangible I can share with my colleagues at work, especially when I want to bring a new idea to our work together. (Sharing a concise summary of a chapter is significantly more effective than asking them to read the full book.)
Most relevant for Substack, though, is that I also create something I get to share with you. Maybe you find these as a helpful reference for a book’s key ideas, or you skim the bullet points for inspiration in your day-to-day work. (Reply or leave a comment to let me know how these summaries are valuable to you … I’d love to know.)
As I recap on the first set of summaries, I thought I’d share a quick snippet on how each of these books have woven their way into my day-to-day life. I’ll include a few teasers for what’s in store for 2023 along the way.
Thanks for joining me on this adventure!
Product Management
This is (naturally) a focus of my reading: my day-to-day role work is as a product manager (no, I don’t read full-time), and my most active professional community is via Lenny’s Newsletter. In 2023, I’m excited to build on these titles with Empowered (Marty Cagan), Excaping the Build Trap (Melissa Perri), and more.
Continuous Discovery Habits, by Teresa Torres
This book is packed full of practical insights I use daily. Opportunity Solution Trees (chapter 2) are incredibly helpful for mapping the opportunity space at any level of your product organization, whether quickly synthesizing notes from a project kickoff or revamping your entire product roadmap. I’ve also pulled numerous other practices from this book, whether her template for synthesizing customer interviews (chapter 5), strategies for facilitating better ideation sessions (chapter 8), and more.
Inspired, by Marty Cagan
It’s hard to underemphasize the importance of this book within the field of Product Management. I often refer to it as the glossary of product terms because Marty Cagan (and his work through the Silicon Valley Product Group) shaped so much of the language we share in the domain through this book. I read this book earlier in my career and regularly revisit the notes while reflecting on my individual contributor work. I’m actively reading his follow-up book, Empowered, which I’m excited to share soon.
Leadership & Management
I have spent the lion’s share of my career in smaller companies, and so I love reading of leaders who either directly or indirectly guided companies through growth. These books touch on actionable techniques for successfully leading and managing others. In 2023, I’m excited to build on these titles with Working Backwards (Colin Bryar, Bill Carr), High Output Management (Andrew Grove), Multiplers (Liz Wiseman), and more.
Build, by Tony Fadell
My two biggest takeaways from this book were the underlying emotional messages. First, we must care deeply about our work and that of others, whether as CEO (where caring is one of your most important roles) or as any other contributor on the team. Second, we must not fear failure within any individual step of your career, since opportunities will continue to open up, especially when you work on something you truly enjoy and you approach your work with care. Build includes plenty of other useful insights, of course. I particularly enjoyed his reminder to avoid habituation (chapter 5.3) and structured approach to storytelling and marketing (chapters 3.2 and 5.4 respectively).
Amp It Up, by Frank Slootman
One aspect that has stuck with me is the importance of execution above strategy (chapter 5). Your team’s ability to execute amplifies whatever strategy you have in place and enables you to pursue audacious goals. Another perspective of his that has stuck with me is the need to cultivate your own driver mindset, as contrasted with any passenger tendencies (chapter 6).
Trillion Dollar Coach, by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle
Extensive references to Bill Campbell within Build (Tony Fadell) and Empowered (Marty Cagan) brought me back to my notes on this book. The overwhelming takeaway I have is for any CEO or board member to strongly consider bringing in a coach to work with all members of the executive team. Such a coach can develop a uniquely useful perspective to help resolve conflicts, address elephants in the room, “be the evangelist for courage” (chapter 3), and more to guide the team to success.
Business Strategy
I’m grateful to my fellow #book-club members in the Lenny’s Newsletter Slack community for deep diving into this topic area. These books (and our discussions) have shaped and improved my own product strategy work along the way. I’m excited to elaborate on these titles with Understanding Michael Porter (Joan Magretta) and possibly Playing to Win (A.G. Lafley & Roger Martin) during 2023.
Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt
My strongest and most lasting (so far) impression from this book came from Part 1, where he introduces the broader concepts. Rumelt’s framing of bad strategy (as contrasted with good strategy) is recognizable not just in work, but even broadly in how we approach life. I revisit my notes to inoculate myself against temptations of lazy strategic thinking. Ultimately, his central recommendation (and “guiding light mindset”) is to simply do the hard work of developing good strategy for your company and product. More specifically, I’ve extracted a series of prompts to help me hone my strategy, with examples like:
Do I have a compelling diagnosis of what's most important?
Can I find any red-flags for bad strategy (fluff, etc.)
Am I overly reliant on external experts for my diagnosis or have I actually developed relevant expertise of my own?
7 Powers, by Hamilton Helmer
Of the materials I’ve read so far, this is the best (i.e. mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive) articulation of the different flavors of business advantages companies can pursue. 7 Powers complements (or dare I say, improves on) Part 2 of Good Strategy / Bad Strategy. The interesting thing about this book is that even after reading it closely, there can still be a lot of room for interpretation of what exactly constitutes examples of the different powers. If anything, you’ll find excellent fodder for ongoing discussion and debate as we seek to improve our strategic thinking.
Continuous Improvement
Naturally, my own insatiable curiosity draws me toward insightful perspectives on how to think, engage with others, and learn effectively along the way. I’m excited to expand on the titles below with other long-time favorites like Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman), Grit (Angela Duckworth), Quit (Annie Duke), Crucial Conversations (Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, et al.),and many more.
Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps, by Jennifer Garvey Berger
This short book is one of my personal favorites. Each of the five mindtraps are memorable and stick around, whether our need for a) simple stories; b) feeling right; c) agreement with others; d) control; or e) to protect our ego. In particular, I still think about how feeling right about something is actually an emotional experience more or less unrelated to whether or not we are in fact correct. Another strategy from this book I use frequently is to imagine strong emotions as being many different emotions braided together. I have rescued myself from numerous challenging moments over the years by first identifying and grounding myself in the more positive threads before working to resolve the harder emotions one by one.
Thinking in Bets, by Annie Duke
This book somehow helped me finally understand the true nature of belief within my day-to-day life. I used to believe (ironic, I know) that this referred mainly to Big Things, whether metaphysical or simply more profound. In reality, we are guided by our beliefs in every decision, even in mundane ways. I may decide to eat chicken at the restaurant because I believe I will enjoy that the best and I also believe it has less of an impact on the environment. Duke explains further how we are credulous by nature, and we need to engage in truthseeking to make sure our beliefs are actually grounded in reality. An unexpected side benefit of this perspective is how I have vastly improved how much value I receive from discussions with mentors. I now frame conversations with truthseeking as the primary goal, where I provide context and then actively work to update the accuracy of my understanding of reality.
Atomic Habits, by James Clear
I was lucky to read this book with a small group of members of a professional network managed by First Round Capital (for employees of their portfolio companies). We started the book club by sharing our desired goals, and then we spent the subsequent 5 session holding each other accountable and discussing the habits and systems we were developing to unlock success. I still rely on some of my new habits and systems now 7 months later, and it has shaped my overall productivity. (One favorite habit: no video content until after 6pm.)
Surpassing Ourselves, by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia
This book is a long-time personal favorite of mine. I seeded it as an early post in part because this newsletter encompasses my own desire to learn, grow, and find a community in which I can continue to learn. This book provides a compelling reminder that experience alone does not lead anyone to develop expertise. This only happens when you regularly reflect on your practice and reinvest your mental energy into areas where you know you can continue to improve. Indeed, this is a big part of why I read as deeply as I do.
Thank you for your curiosity and interest. I look forward to offering more of this work over time!