Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success

Phil Jackson won eleven NBA championships as a coach — six with the Bulls, five with the Lakers — and the book is his account of how to lead teams of extreme talent and extreme ego. Jackson's method blended triangle-offence tactics with mindfulness, Zen, and an unusually patient approach to managing people (Jordan, Pippen, Kobe, Shaq) whose egos could easily have broken the system. For product direction the book is more useful than sports autobiographies usually are: the problem Jackson was solving — helping a small number of high performers stay a team for long enough to win — is exactly the problem most product organisations face at scale. Read for the specific scenes, not the general maxims.