Top Book Recommendations by Diana Kimball Berlin: Best Books for Success

Diana Kimball Berlin is a product designer and coach based in San Francisco. She works at Quip as a product manager and runs a podcast called Should We. Diana was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Soon after, her family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Berlin claims that books were her first love. When she was eleven months old, her mom wrote to a friend: “Her favorite activity with a parent is reading books (of course, there is a strong possibility we conditioned her to do this).”

Diana Berlin found it tough to break into technology with her degree in history. Before even talking to me, most companies wanted to see a computer science degree. Despite this, Microsoft was willing to hire liberal arts grads into program management roles and set them up for success. Diana spent a summer in Seattle and then a few years in Silicon Valley as a program manager for Office Graphics and then PowerPoint.

After Microsoft, Diana spent two years at Harvard Business School. She then joined Kickstarter in the summer. From there, she moved to Berlin to join SoundCloud as a generalist at a high-growth startup. She worked with my managers to continuously revisit my responsibilities and point them toward impact and learning.

Diana Berlin moved into a product role at SoundCloud, and eventually realized that she was ready to return to the U.S. Soon, she found Quip :  a startup led by product thinkers she admired, seizing the opportunity to redefine productivity. Diana jumped at the chance to shape a product still in its early days and joined the team in January 2016. Seven months later, in August 2016, Salesforce acquired Quip, creating the opportunity to see an acquisition up close. Over the next four years, Diana grew with the team—ultimately leading a group of product managers, user researchers, and data scientists as VP Product. In 2021, Berlin joined Matrix Partners as an early-stage investor