A few I enjoyed:

* Outcomes Over Outputs: Why Customer Behavior is the Key Metric for Business Success

* Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs

* The Lean Startup (often referenced in terms of agile processes, but I think the most important lessons are around product management)

Specifically to your question of defining the best features, goals, and products, I recommend these books:

* 20 YC Lessons

* Outcomes Over Output (a lightweight version of The Lean Startup)

* Strategy Rules

* How Google Works

Here's the rest of my Product Manager book reviews: https://www.briansnotes.io/audience/product-manager/

A list I put together a while back: https://www.encona.com/posts/product-manager-resources

Overview books:

* Inspired

* The Product Manager’s Desk Reference

* The Lean Startup

* Agile Product Management with Scrum

Interview preparation (good for breadth, even if you’re not applying for jobs):

* Decode & Conquer

* Cracking the PM interview

Other good books for PMs:

* Hooked

* The Design of Everyday Things

* Zero to One

* Traction

> From the "never give up" point of view, I've changed my mind, thanks to books like The Lean Startup, Blitzscaling, and my own experience.

It depends on whether you're giving up on the process or the goal. Startups "give up" or pivot on their original and subsequent ideas so often that's it's considered a best practice. This is different from founders giving up on starting a business.

Like you mentioned, the habit is what matters.

I used to think like this. At it's core, it's a variation of "never give up", mixed with "the power of habit".

I agree with "the power of habit" part.

From the "never give up" point of view, I've changed my mind, thanks to books like The Lean Startup, Blitzscaling, and my own experience.

The bottom line message seems to be "keep insisting and you'll be successful". I spent 3+ years working in a game that never took off as a side project. In hindsight, I should have taken the hint of the lack of traction early on and dropped the whole thing. Instead I sank countless hours into a project that never worked out. How many prototypes could I have produced in the same time?

Bottom line, habits are good, so long as we don't mix it up with the concept of "don't give up and you'll be successful".

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is a startup bible for creating a product, testing and iterating.
As an option, you can try to look for a downloadable version on these websites: https://custom-writing.org/blog/free-books-online#business

Audio books.

Because of WFH, found a lot of additional time. Used that for listening to around 10 audio books in the past year. Most of the books I read were from a project management and entrepreneurship perspective. I used/discussed concepts learnt for work and felt slightly better off because of that. An example was using 5-whys for process improvement from The Lean Startup.

Don't Make Me Think is a great book. Even though the example screenshots are from the early 2000s, the principles still apply. I recommend that book to all of my engineers.

However, I recently read The Design of Everyday Things and was really disappointed. The sections about door handles, stoves, and elevator buttons are interesting but that's only 1/3 of the book. The rest is about iterative design and system failure, for which there are better books like The Lean Startup and Drift Into Failure.

Read the Lean Startup, I think it is helpful for software entrepreneurs