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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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…
The Accidental Billionaires
Mezrich's account of Facebook's founding offers product directors a visceral case study in how founding mythology diverges from institutional reality: the platform that redefined social identity online was built in a con…
Moneyball
Lewis chronicles how Billy Beane's Oakland Athletics exploited systematic mispricings in baseball's talent market by replacing scout intuition with statistical analysis — a case study in what happens when an organisation…
Story of Your Life
Ted Chiang's novella — miscategorised here as essay, it is short fiction — is the source for Villeneuve's 'Arrival' and remains one of the most rigorous explorations of how language restructures cognition and temporal pe…
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Brenner's 1999 Vanity Fair article (not a book) reconstructing Jeffrey Wigand's whistleblowing against Brown & Williamson is a case study in what happens when an institution's information architecture becomes a weapon ag…
Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties
Goodwin's memoir of his years as a Kennedy-Johnson speechwriter and policy architect is the backstory behind 'Quiz Show,' the film drawn partly from his investigation of the 1950s television fraud scandals. For product d…
Contact
Sagan's novel dramatises what happens when humanity receives an unambiguous signal from outside: the hard question is never detection but interpretation, authentication, and the politics of who gets to act on the message…
All the President's Men
Bernstein and Woodward's account of the Watergate investigation is, at its core, a study in information architecture under adversarial conditions: how to verify, connect, and act on partial signals when powerful institut…
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Le Carré's masterwork of institutional betrayal depicts the Circus—Britain's intelligence service—as an organisation so encrusted with hierarchy, loyalty myth, and defensive ritual that it cannot identify the mole corrod…
Roadside Picnic
The Strugatskys imagined a world where alien visitors left behind a Zone of incomprehensible artifacts — objects whose purposes resist human understanding, whose use is lethal without the right guide, whose value is real…
Understanding decision errors
Palminteri and Wyart have established themselves as a productive collaboration in the library's decision-making research, with their previous work scoring 8 for bringing computational insights to human judgment under unc…
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Barlow wrote this in Davos in February 1996, the night the Telecommunications Act was signed, and it became the founding manifesto of internet libertarianism. In four pages he declared that governments had no sovereignty…
The Story of My Life
Helen Keller's autobiography, written at twenty-two, is the account of a mind constructed against unusual constraints — deaf and blind from nineteen months old, she learned language at seven and went on to read and write…
Tasks At Work: Comparative Advantage, Technology and Labor Demand
Acemoglu and Restrepo's task-based framework offers the most rigorous economic lens for understanding how AI reshapes work — not just which jobs disappear, but how comparative advantage shifts between humans and machines…
Towards Robust Distributed Systems
In this keynote at the 2000 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, Brewer conjectured that a distributed system cannot simultaneously guarantee consistency, availability, and partition tolerance — you must…
Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
The most widely sold web usability book ever written, and it earns the distinction by being short, funny, and relentlessly practical. Krug's central argument is that users do not read pages — they scan them, and every el…
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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.