Running in Circles: Why Agile Isn’t Working and What We Do Differently: All PMs have likely experienced truly agile projects that may have achieved the goal of regularly shipping products over an extended period of time. However, most of us have also worked on mostly agile projects that have borrowed a few core constructs of the agile methodology without the full benefits, including shipping regularly. This article focuses on the reality of agile and acknowledges that projects are really about people—with brains, habits, weaknesses—who need to learn about stuff before jumping into designing and building.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World: This is one of our top business books of the year, as it discusses the oft-ignored battle going on in the workplace for our attention: we’re building tools and habits that we think are enabling us to do better work (here’s looking at you, Slack) but actually inhibit our brain’s magic abilities.

People Styles at Work: Cantina has recently participated in Predictive Index (PI) assessments for all employees, but this book is a more informal guide for identifying predominant team working styles and how to readjust approaches based on different personalities.

Made to Stick: This book talks about why some ideas live and many others (sometimes great) die, and is as much about pitching ideas as it is about creativity. Like Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World stresses, we sometimes forget about people and the way the brain works: we are in many ways still children when it comes to understanding and believing in new ideas (hint: presentations are like adult picture books).

The AI Podcast by NVIDIA: We highly recommend this AI podcast, which provides a solid understanding of how AI is used in products and businesses.

Food for Agile Thought: One of our go-to-newsletters for agile, scrum, team management, and so many other relevant PM topics.

LAUNCH Ticker: This twice-daily email newsletter provides digestible tech news segments, with topics ranging from: product launches & updates, acquisitions, funding & stock milestones, legal cases & outcomes, staffing updates, and many other items.

Mind the Product: As both another go-to newsletter and source of dynamic conference presentations (video recordings), this is always a key reference for PM advice from cross-industry experts addressing a variety of strategic problems.