Readings on digital product
The Shape That Repeats: Networks, Fractals, and the Geometry of Decentralisation
Why the same acentred, self-similar, scale-free structure keeps appearing across mathematics, philosophy, biology, computer science and political theory.
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Advise and Consent
Drury's Pulitzer-winning novel dissects the U.S. Senate confirmation process with a journalist's precision, showing how institutional power is exercised through procedure, loyalty, and the strategic deployment of informa…
AI, Human Cognition and Knowledge Collapse
Acemoglu, Kong, and Ozdaglar do something rare: they build a model with genuine generative architecture — not a metaphor about AI deskilling, but a formal dynamic system showing precisely when and why agentic AI tips a s…
Glengarry Glen Ross
Mamet's Pulitzer-winning play anatomises a sales office in freefall, where language is simultaneously weapon, disguise, and currency—a system that reveals how organisational pressure corrupts individual agency and degrad…
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell's dystopian novel remains the foundational text for understanding how information architecture becomes an instrument of power. The mechanisms of Newspeak—systematic reduction of vocabulary to constrain thought—pre…
The Andromeda Strain
Crichton's 1969 techno-thriller is structured as a procedural autopsy of a crisis response system, and that architecture is its real argument: it dramatises how expert teams fail not from ignorance but from protocol rigi…
Pressure
David Haig's play dramatises the 1944 confrontation between Scottish meteorologist James Stagg and General Eisenhower over whether weather conditions would permit the D-Day landings — a decision where imperfect data, ins…
The Zone of Interest
Amis sets his novel inside the Nazi extermination apparatus, narrating through perpetrators and bystanders who have so thoroughly normalised their work that atrocity becomes administrative routine—a condition he calls th…
A Scanner Darkly
Dick's semi-autobiographical novel presents a surveillance apparatus that destroys the very agents operating it — Bob Arctor spies on himself without recognising the subject, a structural metaphor for what happens when m…
Prince of the City
Daley's account of NYPD detective Bob Leuci's undercover work against police corruption is fundamentally a study in what happens when an informant becomes a system—when one person's decision to cooperate with institution…
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
A behavioral economist and a cognitive psychologist demonstrate that scarcity — of any resource — produces a measurable, involuntary cognitive state: heightened focus on the scarce resource at the cost of everything else…
I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy
Wiener's second autobiographical volume covers his mature career at MIT, from the 1920s through the founding of cybernetics in the 1940s and its aftermath. He describes how wartime work on anti-aircraft prediction led hi…
The Extended Mind
Twenty pages that opened the discussion about whether the mind ends at the skull. Clark and Chalmers argue through the thought experiment of Otto and his notebook that if an external resource plays the same functional ro…
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
The original hacker ethic: do it, try it, share it. Levy documents how a culture that started in an MIT model-railroad club at night turned into the way the software industry actually works — by building in the open, by…
Politics and the English Language
Orwell's six rules for writing clear prose — never use a metaphor you have seen before, never use a long word where a short one will do, if it is possible to cut a word always cut it, never use the passive where you can…
The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life
Malone extends his 1987 paper with Yates and Benjamin to argue that technology is pushing organisations toward radical decentralisation — not as an ideology but as the inevitable economic consequence of falling communica…
Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team
Sinek's practical companion to Start With Why — a workbook for individuals and teams to articulate their own purpose. The book is formulaic, which is either its strength or its weakness depending on who you ask. For prod…
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The Oracle That Only Repeats: Simulacra of Inquiry from Plato to the LLM
Why interrogating a language model has the form of dialogue and the substance of a shuffled secondary source — and why fieldwork exists to reach what no corpus contains.
The Compass and the Terrain: Readings on the Direction of Digital Products
Essential product management reading list: 30+ annotated books on product leadership, strategy, discovery, and team design — from Drucker, Ohno, and Grove to Cagan, Ries, and Team Topologies.
The Place That Was Named Before It Was Built: Literature, Philosophy, and the Invention of Digital Space
How cyberspace was imagined in fiction, designed by engineers, inhabited by communities, and questioned by philosophers — from Borges to Carr.
The Theory in the Code: A History of the Practice of Building Software
What does it mean to build software well — and who gets to decide? An itinerary through six decades of the craft, from the theoretical foundations that defined programming as an intellectual activity to the ongoing negotiation between the organisation's need for legibility and the builder's need for discretion.
From Coase to AI: Technology, Organizations, and the Frontier Between Compacting and Decentralizing
Why firms exist, why they grew, and how each technological wave redraws their boundaries — from Coase to AI.