Great books for business analysts that work in products
A reading list for BAs in product teams
Many business analysis professionals work in a product setting. Whether you’re collaborating with, or acting as, a product owner, there are product management approaches that are useful for conducting business analysis. Here are some book recommendations covering everything from the product process and discovery interviews to problem framing and documentation.
Extra-list
First and foremost, a business analysis professional MUST start with the Agile Extension of the BABoK® and the Guide to Product Ownership Analysis (POA).
These are official knowledge guides from the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®) that focus on agility and product ownership. I personally love both frameworks. Both guides describe how to perform different BA techniques (there are 24 covered in the Agile Extension, and 29 in the Guide to Product Ownership Analysis). These techniques can be combined with the 50 techniques from the Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge — BABoK — version 3.
Both guides are only available to members of the IIBA. If you want to learn more about how to apply both frameworks, read about applying the Agile Extension framework here, and about applying the POA framework here.
Shaping the product discovery process
Marty Cagan’s book “Inspired” provides many tools that are aligned with agile and lean product development, and it’s almost a “bible” for everyone that plays a role in product management.
This book covers a wide set of techniques and guides for how to use them within discovery framing and the planning of the discovery process. It also has many suggestions on ideation, prototyping and testing.
There are other books that provide complementary tools on product management and value-orientation you can read as well, for example Melissa Perri’s “Escaping the Build Trap”.
This book is about product teams focusing on the value that a product should deliver, rather than focusing on delivering features with no value criteria. By presenting the steps of a “Product Kata”, the book covers how to set the way to only develop features that deliver value to customers and continuously improve the product.
The basis for defining what value should be delivered is another interesting input. In Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why”, we are introduced to the “Golden circle”, where the sequence of decisions starts by defining and understanding the ‘Why’, ‘Who’, ‘What’ and ‘How’. And the biggest tip for analyzing the outcome of that initiative is exactly because it starts with the “Why”.
Obs: using the concept of starting with the “Why” and the “Golden circle” is what business analysts use when applying the impact mapping technique (Why = Goal; How = Actor + Impact; What = Deliverable).
Customer interviews
Interviews are a crucial part of the elicitation of a product’s requirements. A business analysis professional may register all the stakeholder’s dictated “wishlist” items, or you can engage with the stakeholder and elicit what their actual needs are.
In Teresa Torres’ book “Continuous Discovery Habits”, the author covers how to engage customers not only in the early stages of product development, but also to talk to them in a continuous cadence (preferably a weekly one) and get the most out of discovering and framing their actual needs.
The “discovery habits” that are continuous start by defining a desired outcome, interviewing for discovering opportunities, capturing them and synthesizing them in experience maps and opportunity solution trees. The opportunities are then prioritized, followed by identifying solutions and assumptions. Those assumptions should be tested rapidly and continuously measuring the impact all the way through delivery.
Interviews only have value if we can depict the problem in question, rather than telling us the solution they want. That is the premise of the Mom Test, by Rob Fitzpatrick: your mom will always like your idea, but asking the right questions can make her tell you what you really need to hear.
So, the Mom Test is another interesting approach for conducting stakeholder interviews. It has similarities with “Continuous Discovery Habits”, as the questions should focus on their past experiences to discover an opportunity. Business analysis professionals must assure stakeholders talk about their life instead of hearing your idea for a solution. And first and foremost, listen much more than talk. The goal is to truly empathize with them (side note: The Guide to Product Ownership Analysis has an entire domain about how to “Cultivate customer intimacy”. This is crucial!)
Problem/opportunity framing
In product discovery, the definition of the problem is almost never clearly in front of you to collect and write requirements.
In this section, I focus on methods that boost the framing of a problem (or business opportunity) to target.
1. Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) — One of the key takeaways from JTBD, in comparison with other approaches, is that understanding why a product or service was “hired” (a JTBD metaphor) includes not only the functional dimension, but also the circumstances and emotional dimensions. The book “Jobs to be Done — Theory to Practice” by Anthony Ulwick describes a framework that you can use to define your jobs. Clayton Christensen’s book “Competing against luck” provides many cases of JTBD and how they were used in comparison to other problem/opportunity framing approaches.
2. Lean Inception — Written by Paulo Caroli, this book describes the method split in a 5-day workshop to discover what to compose a minimal viable product (MVP), by including concepts such as product vision, personas, customer journeys, and others.
3. Design Sprint — Similar to the Lean Inception, a Design Sprint focuses on rapidly validating an idea. In the book “Sprint” by Jake Knapp, the process is described in a 5-day workshop where you first define the idea, design and build it, and finally validate it closely with users.
4. Product Backlog Building — Fabio Aguiar’s provides guidance into the discovery process, and uses its output to write the product backlog items, and acceptance criteria, but also to prioritize the items and order them in the releases.
5. User story mapping — This book by Jeff Patton describes the method of how a set of user stories can solve a problem. The method consists of sequencing the user’s activities and then allows the eliciting of stories and tasks for the team to work on so that the solution can support the user’s activities that were presented. The method has been adopted worldwide because it fosters collaboration between team members. The output is a visual representation of work to be done, which then allows us to plan iterations and/or releases, discuss priorities, etc.
Documentation
For a “lightweight” documentation, Nils Janse’s book “Epic alignment” suggest the requirements can be captured in epic documents, and the documents should be live documents throughout the product development stages — namely Ideation, Discovery, Priorization, Refinement, Development and Testing.
The document is suggested to be written in a tool that enables live documents and easy outliners, such as Google Docs. The epic level is the chosen level for the scope of the document. Each epic is described with its user stories and includes all relevant information gathered from discovery to the delivery stage.
The business analysis process
The following books focus on the process of business analysis in an agile context — if you prefer, the process to do “agile business analysis”.
We can’t rule out the “traditional” way of doing business analysis, or also doing business analysis for strategic purposes. But, and especially working closely at the team level, business analysis has to be “agile”.
Kent McDonald’s “Beyond Requirements — Analysis with an Agile Mindset” covers many business analysis tools and techniques, from specifications to diagrams. In this book, the readers learn how to understand stakeholders, the context, the need, and the solution. The book covers the use of these tools and techniques across both the discovery and delivery stages. Examples include stakeholder map, personas, purpose-based alignment, decision filters, opportunity assessment, impact mapping, story mapping, definition of ready, discovery and delivery boards, and many others.
Also, the book “Business Analysis Agility — Solve the Real Problem, Deliver Real Value” by James and Suzanne Robertson describes the use of many business analysis outputs with the “just-enough” mindset. The focus is on understanding the customer and the need, in order to ensure the team is delivering the right value. The analysis outputs from the book include customer segments, interviews, personas, scope modeling, business events, modeling, evolutionary design, story maps, the volere template, and documentation, among others.
Both books include case studies for the reader to follow the application of the techniques throughout. But these books are not only about techniques. They perfectly describe what needs to be shifted in terms of mindset and attitude of doing business analysis in an agile context.
Final notes
The world of product management is huge, and many other books could be on this list. I selected some that focused on topics that I consider to be more valuable to the eyes of a business analyst.
There are many ways of categorizing what you can learn for the business analysis job. In this article, I categorized the books as: shaping the discovery process, customer interviews, problem/opportunity framing, documentation, and the (“agile”) business analysis process.
In case you are interested in product books outside these categories, there is a visual guide to see how many books can be applied in product management here.
Do you know any book that could be part of this list? Let me know in the comments! :)
