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…
The Craftsman
Not a technology book, but its central thesis resonates deeply: good work is born from making, not from planning. The craftsman learns by doing, develops judgement through practice, and their knowledge is inseparable fro…
Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization
Galloway's thesis is that the internet is not, in any politically meaningful sense, a space of freedom — it is a space of protocol. He argues that TCP/IP and DNS constitute a new form of control that operates not through…
Democratizing Innovation
Von Hippel's argument that users — not manufacturers — are the primary source of commercially significant innovation, and that the internet has radically lowered the cost of user-to-user innovation diffusion. Drawing on…
Contextual Design: Design for Life
Holtzblatt and Beyer's contextual design methodology is one of the foundational approaches to bringing field research into product development. The core idea is that you cannot understand users from interviews alone — yo…
Ficciones
Before anyone had built a computer network, Borges had already imagined its topology. "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) describes a novel that is also a labyrinth — a structure in which every decision branches into al…
The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
The book that coined the discipline of customer development and seeded everything "lean startup" later systematised. Blank's claim is that startups fail not because of bad products but because they sell to the wrong cust…
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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.